Promoting Citizens' willingness to participate in coproduction in public service through information frames

Public service provision reform widely calls for coproduction. Based on the framing effect theory, we took waste sorting as a research context and explored the effects of goal frames and temporal frames on citizens' willingness to participate in coproduction through two between-subject survey experiments. We found that citizens' participation willingness was significantly increased when using goal frames or temporal frames. Furthermore, compared with gain frames, the effect of loss frames on citizens' willingness was significantly stronger, whereas the difference in the effect of present-oriented frames and future-oriented frames was not significant. When the information was constructed by combining loss frames and present-oriented frames, citizens' willingness reached the highest level among the four combinations. This study has implications for nudging coproduction by information frames and implies that presenting the loss-framed information in present-oriented frames can maximally promote citizens' willingness to participate in coproduction.