This thesis focuses on the incentives of prosocial behaviors (prosocial consumption behavior and online content contributions), and discusses the mechanisms behind different incentives. In Chapter 1, it presents a U-shape causal relationship between money incentives and the sales for environment-friendly cars: a money incentive (i.e., tax refund or cash subsidy) may not always lead to an increase in consumption of prosocial cars, but instead, reduce the sales of environment-friendly cars when it is too small (i.e., crowding-out effect). Only when the money incentive reaches a big enough amount, it enhances the sales of environment-friendly cars. In addition, Chapter 1 also provides evidences on the mechanism of the U-shape relationship. The U-shape relationship is driven by consumers' d...[ Read more ]

This thesis focuses on the incentives of prosocial behaviors (prosocial consumption behavior and online content contributions), and discusses the mechanisms behind different incentives. In Chapter 1, it presents a U-shape causal relationship between money incentives and the sales for environment-friendly cars: a money incentive (i.e., tax refund or cash subsidy) may not always lead to an increase in consumption of prosocial cars, but instead, reduce the sales of environment-friendly cars when it is too small (i.e., crowding-out effect). Only when the money incentive reaches a big enough amount, it enhances the sales of environment-friendly cars. In addition, Chapter 1 also provides evidences on the mechanism of the U-shape relationship. The U-shape relationship is driven by consumers' deliberate management on their social image: consumers who care about their social image would be less likely to buy environment-friendly cars in order to avoid been seen as greedy persons when a small amount of money incentive is presented for such cars. It also finds that, unlike charitable behaviors, prosocial consumption is not affected by the interaction between the extrinsic monetary incentive and the intrinsic incentive. The findings in Chapter 1 has strong implications for policy makers and firm managers. Chapter 2 presents theory and empirical evidence on how the content commercialization can facilitate private contributions. More Specifically, given users are forward-looking, the content commercialization can solve the two major problems faced by online content platforms: under-provision of online content at the aggregate level, and the excessive supply of popular content. Chapter 2 examines the shift in quantity and quality of private contribution when the content commercialization takes effect. It finds that the average effect of the content commercialization is an increment of the quantity of private contribution, and a decrease of the quality of private contribution. However, the effects of the content commercialization differ according to users' types. If participating into the content commercialization program is important to incentivize a user's effort, then we would expect a drop in such effort once the goal (participating) is attained. Moreover, instead of making participants to produce more popular content, the content commercialization program incentivizes participants to rely heavier on topics of their expertise. The findings from the two chapters provide deep understandings on the causal relationship between the monetary reward and prosocial behaviors, and also offer avenues to new mechanisms of incentivizing private contributions.