Prosocial and financial incentives for biodiversity conservation: A field experiment using a smartphone app

Ascertaining the number, type, and location of plant, insect, and animal species is essential for biodiversity conservation. However, it is difficult to comprehensively monitor the situation using only expert-led surveys, and therefore information voluntarily provided by citizens is helpful in determining species distribution. To effectively encourage citizens to share data, this study proposed a prosocial incentive that rewards providing species information with donations for endangered species conservation activities. We conducted a field experiment with users (N = 830) of a widely used Japanese smartphone app “biome” where they post species photos and measured the incentive's effect on their posting behavior. In addition, we measured the effect of a financial incentive that provides monetary rewards for posting species photos and compared the two incentives' effects. The analyses revealed that while the prosocial incentive did not increase the number of posts on average, it could influence the content of the posts, increasing the proportion of posts on rare species. In contrast, the financial incentive significantly increased the total number of posts and, in particular, the number of posts on less rare and invasive species. Our results indicate that the prosocial and financial incentives could stimulate different motivations and encourage different posting behaviors.