During the last two decades economists have made much progress in understanding incentives, contracts and organisations … effects of incentives. Economists may fail to understand the levels and the changes in behaviour if they neglect motives like … the desire to reciprocate or the desire to avoid social disapproval. We show that monetary incentives may backfire and …

We study, theoretically and empirically, the effects of incentives on the self-selection and coordination of motivated …). Agents differ in their motivation to exert social effort. Our model predicts that lowering incentives for selfish effort in … prediction in a lab experiment allowing us to cleanly separate the selection effect from other effects of low incentives. Results …