Coproduction of core and complementary tasks in times of service decline: Experimental evidence

Abstract

Citizen coproduction has long been recognized as a lever to maintain service quality in times of service decline, but the key notion that citizens will “pitch in” and coproduce in times of service decline has undergone little empirical scrutiny. Using elderly care in Denmark as empirical setting, we conduct a survey experiment with a two-by-two factorial design in a representative sample of elderly citizens (n = 864) to evaluate the effects of a true service decline cue (Treatment 1) and of task-specific encouragements (Treatment 2) on willingness to coproduce. We leverage the distinction between core and complementary tasks to hypothesize that service decline mostly affects coproduction of core tasks, and that this motivation can be increased with task-specific encouragement. We find evidence that a service decline cue increases the willingness to coproduce core tasks, but no evidence of an additional effect of the task-specific encouragement.