The effects of volunteer preferences on nonprofit organizations: a theoretical study.

This dissertation is the result of an interdepartmental collaboration between economists and psychologists. The role of this dissertation within the research project is to provide an economic analysis of volunteering. In doing so, we focus mainly on the theoretical modeling of volunteering, leaving the empirical analysis to other research within the research project and to future research. The strength of this interdisciplinary collaboration is that it has enabled us to use insights from different fields which are valuable for the study of volunteering. The classical economic tenet of a short-term revenue maximizing agent is not sufficient to accurately describe the behavior of volunteers. Thus, in this economically focused dissertation we integrate theories from psychology such as psychological contracts (Rousseau, 1995), self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 2000) and theories of motivation (Clary et al., 1996) with economic models such as signaling (Spence, 1973), evolutionary game theory (McElreath and Boyd, 2007) and static and dynamic optimization (Dorfman, 1969).The value of this dissertation is that it tries to build bridges between economic models and the relevant interpretation and adaptation of those models to a volunteering and nonprofit framework. It is our opinion that, even though some researchers have attempted to integrate economical modeling and volunteering (for example, Bénabou and Tirole, 2003), there is still important research to be done in this area. This dissertation is one such attempt to integrate economical modeling and volunteering.