See It, Say It: Encouraging Citizen Reporting of Sustainability and Inclusivity Infrastructure Issues in Cities

Abstract

Citizen reporting apps are becoming increasingly popular in smart cities to help local authorities identify, prioritize and resolve issues with public infrastructure faster and according to citizen needs. However, soliciting and sustaining high-quality incident reports is challenging since free riding is an attractive option. Another challenge is making such apps equally open and accessible to less affluent and vulnerable groups. We model citizen reporting as a public good game to investigate how two potential non-monetary, non-competitive interventions affect contributions: increasing the salience of the citizen’s group identity, and increasing the salience of the expressive values. We conducted an online experiment to test our hypotheses. Our results reveal that neither salience of group identity nor expressive values increased contributions toward the public good.