Rhythm of the game: how time-of-day and gamification rewards influence pay-what-you-want payments

Purpose This paper aims to make a novel proposition that different types of gamification rewards (symbolic versus verbal versus tangible) will have differential impacts on pay-what-you-want (PWYW) payments. Design/methodology/approach Three laboratory experiments, along with a field study (N = 255, 838, 561 and 117) were conducted to empirically test the propositions. Findings Collectively, the findings indicate that symbolic rewards drive the highest PWYW payments, followed by verbal and tangible rewards. Furthermore, symbolic rewards are most effective in the morning, followed by verbal in the afternoon and tangible in the evening. The effect of reward type and time-of-day jointly influenced PWYW payments through internal reference price. Research limitations/implications Future work can study if existing variables known to influence PWYW prices (e.g. time pressure) can interact with gamification rewards to influence payments. Practical implications The present work equips managers with a significant tool, i.e. reward type, to encourage higher PWYW payments. Originality/value No previous work has proposed and empirically tested how the joint influence of time-of-day and gamification rewards may influence PWYW payments – a novel contribution of this work.