Crowding out

Motivation crowding theory is an phenomena in economics that explains how, for example, paid labor can undermine intrinsic motivation. In particular, I am interested in the effect that crowding out has on free and open source software projects where large number of contributions may come from volunteers. Unintuitively, it seems that paying people to do a task may reduce the amount of work completed.

Web pages that discuss the topic include:

• Page on the Rewards Controversy
• Discussion of the issue as it pertains to free software as it appeared on Luis Villa's blog