Examining the role of intrinsic and extrinsic cues from service requirement narratives in web-based time banking participation decisions

Introduction: Time banking, known as "Community/Neighborhood Pension," instantiates a form of co-creation that can provide a new solution to fulfil the unmet social service needs of community members with idle resources, which is a feasible solution to alleviate pension pressure. The sustainable operation of time banks relies on the co-creation and active participation of community members. Therefore, in this study, we investigate the motivation of members to participate in web-based time banks from a service requirement narrative perspective.

Methods: We collected data of 21969 service requirement projects from publicly available information on the website of Nansha Timebank (nstimebank.com, a web-based time bank platform in China). Using the data, we built a model to assess how the intrinsic and extrinsic cues underlying service requirement narratives affect the time bank participation decisions of service providers drawing on grounded theory. Then we conducted a regression analysis to test our hypotheses.

Results: We find that participants respond positively to time coins return and narratives highlighting social connection and value fulfilment but respond negatively to service hour costs and empathy-altruism cues.

Discussion: Our findings suggest that people who receive services in web-based time banking platform should utilize different linguistic cues in service requirement descriptions to improve service exchange results.