Abstract
Pay-What-You-Want (PWYW) pricing represents a compelling economic puzzle: in the absence of enforcement, self-interested consumers are expected to pay zero, yet empirical evidence demonstrates substantial positive voluntary payments. This study investigates the behavioral drivers of voluntary micropayments for digital content using a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) with a sample of 642 active digital consumers. We systematically vary social signaling (private vs. social profile vs. public leaderboard) and reciprocity triggers (low vs. high creator effort) to isolate their causal impact on both the decision to pay and the payment magnitude. The results show that public observability significantly increases the probability of payment by 24.3 percentage points, while high creator effort boosts voluntary payment amounts by 38.2%. Crucially, we identify a strong positive interaction effect between social signaling and reciprocity, suggesting that these mechanisms act as complements rather than substitutes. These findings provide critical insights for digital publishers, independent creators, and platform designers, offering a robust behavioral framework to optimize voluntary monetization models in the digital economy.
