Who gets the spotlight: should repeat volunteers be given preferential treatment?

We study how selection procedures for scarce, high-impact volunteering opportunities affect individuals’ willingness to volunteer and the resulting allocation of effort across high- and low-impact opportunities. We compare behavioral responses to three selection mechanisms for high-impact volunteering: (i) random selection, (ii) a first-come-first-served (queue) rule, and (iii) a merit-based rule that always assigns the opportunity to the most proven volunteer. In addition, we examine how these selection mechanisms interact with the increasing marginal product of high-impact volunteering arising from accumulated experience.