Signaling Managerial Objectives to Elicit Volunteer Effort

We examine a nonprofit organization (npo) with a manager and a motivated volunteer, assume that the manager has private information about the volunteer's utility function, that the volunteer has no private information on the manager's utility function, and propose a signaling solution for the volunteer's effort decision. We focus on the general properties of a signal in a npo, specifically taking into account the effects of the volunteer's motivations on the signal. We find that, due to the diversity of volunteer motivations, the set of signals can be large. We relate this to signals that can be used by nonprofit managers in practice and we reinterpret existing practices as signals.