Shedding new light on intrinsic motivation to work: evidence from a discrete choice experiment Joseph Lanfranchi, Mathieu Narcy and Makram Larguem à I. INTRODUCTION The International Social Survey Programme data on work orientations have shown that more than 25% of workers regard the facts that their job ‘‘allows [them] to help other people’’ and ‘‘is useful to society’’ as very important job values. This group of employees represents a share of the workforce as high as the one valuing ‘‘high income’’ (see Clark, 2009). Such evidence for the relevance of the social usefulness of jobs leads to the hypothesis that a significant fraction of workers is not only driven by personal interest when deciding between job offers, but also by moral, other-regarding considerations. Different job values should therefore be reflected in the preferences of different types of workers. Because nonprofit organisations are partly characterised by their goals of producing goods and services that generate social benefits, these organisations should rely on individuals inspired by taking part in such a socially desirable activity. In the terminology of Besley and Ghatak (2005), nonprofit employees would be assimilated to motivated agents, defined as ‘‘agents who pursue goals because they perceive the intrinsic benefits from doing so’’. Consequently, we KYKLOS, Vol. 63 – February 2010 – No. 1, 75–93 r 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA 75 à Corresponding author: Joseph Lanfranchi, Assistant Professor, CEE and LEM, Universite´ Panthe´ on-Assas. LEM, 92 rue d’Assas, 75006 Paris, France. E-mail: lanfranchi@u-paris2.fr. Mathieu Narcy, Assistant Professor, CEE and TEPP (FR 3126, CNRS). CEE, 29 promenade Michel Simon, 93166 Noisy-Le-Grand, France. E-mail: mathieu.narcy@cee-recherche.fr. Makram Larguem, Re- searcher, ERMES (FRE 2887, CNRS), Universite´ Panthe´ on-Assas. ERMES, 12 place du Panthe´ on, 75005 Paris, France. E-mail: maklarguem@yahoo.fr This research forms part of the EPICURUS project (Societal and economic effects on quality of life and well-being: preference identification and priority setting in response to changes in labour market status) – a project supported by the European Commission through the Fifth Framework Program ‘‘Improving Human Potential’’ (contract number HPSE-CT-2002-00143). We would like to thank the participants of the IAREP SABE, EALE Conferences, and the CEE seminar, Andrew Clark, Nikos Georgantzis, and the EPICURUS team for helpful comments. We are also grateful to Bernard van Praag, Ada Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Ioannis Theodossiou for setting up the vignettes experiment.