Change in Intrinsic Motivation with Activity Progress : A Lego Building Laboratory Experiment

The change in intrinsic motivation during an activity is crucial in user generated content, but there is insufficient empirical evidence on this. To objectively examine the relationship between activity time and intrinsic motivation, we conducted an experiment in which participants revealed the minimum willingness to be paid, or reservation wage, for switching from a creative activity, such as playing with LEGO bricks, to tedious tasks, such as a typing task. We adopted the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism to observe the reservation wage under an incentive-compatible condition. Results showed that the minimum willingness to be paid increases as the activity progresses and suggest that intrinsic motivation also increased during the activity. Our result can be adapted to management practices to retain active users in a user-centered platform where users’ intrinsic motivation is a prominent factor in participation