 Most organizations rely not only on monetary incentives, but also on a variety of other motives to elicit effort and encourage production. We rely on the community of open source
software (OSS) developers to study how heterogeneous motivations affect the type and the intensity of individual contributions and how it affects success of the projects. Our primary
focus is on the role of social motivations, which we elicit experimentally on a stratified sample
of 1,194 OSS developers. Our initial finding is that success is positively related to the proportion of altruists, in particular in the role of administrators, and the proportion of reciprocators, in the role of developers. We propose a mechanism underlying these facts and empirical evidence consistent with this story.

