Incentivized Token Peer-Reward Mechanism
RCTReview
In large online peer networks, participants lack natural incentives to invest time giving high-quality feedback to peers without monetary or social rewards.
Picture this
Picture a workplace bonus system where employees receive weekly tickets to award to colleagues who helped them most; those tickets enter a raffle for a valuable prize only if the recipient achieves top performance.
What the evidence says
Token references were among the top 10 most frequent terms in individual-to-individual messages (terms such as "token", "giveusername", "leaderboard"). The bilateral token economy successfully induced strategic peer searching and reciprocal communication across virtual channels.
- Who was studied
- N = 4,660 treated entrepreneurs across 60-person interaction groups in Africa.
- How
- Bi-weekly allocation of 10 digital tokens to each entrepreneur to distribute to helpful peers. Tokens from the top-50 ranked entrepreneurs after Stage 1 evaluation served as lottery tickets for 30 fully funded Bocconi Prizes (Milan trip, pitching event, business course).
What to do
Issue periodic peer-reward tokens linked to high-value performance-contingent prizes to stimulate active peer review and feedback in online learning networks.
From the source
"Every two weeks... individuals were provided with 10 tokens. They were advised to hand these tokens to those peers whom they found most helpful... the tokens given by the 50 highest-ranked entrepreneurs... acted as lottery tickets for one of the 30 (attractive) rewards."
Peer Networks and Entrepreneurship- a Pan-African RCT.pdf