Does the Trusted Neighbour Badge Change Who Actually Volunteers?

A Regression-Discontinuity Test at a Neighbourhood Forum's Naturally Occurring Helpful-Vote Cutoff

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement exploits the naturally occurring vote-count cutoff at which a neighbourhood forum's Trusted Neighbour badge activates, finding that crossing it causes a sizeable rise in duty-roster hours volunteered over the following eight weeks, robust to bandwidth choice and a placebo cutoff. The jump survives a five-week display fault that hid the badge from other members, and the threshold itself has not been revised across eight review cycles despite roughly fivefold growth in the network it gates.

@misc{slop_mn6z54,
  author       = {Joost Nwosu and Bram Ntuli and Thandiwe Solberg},
  title        = {Does the Trusted Neighbour Badge Change Who Actually Volunteers?: A Regression-Discontinuity Test at a Neighbourhood Forum's Naturally Occurring Helpful-Vote Cutoff},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.mn6z54},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-neighbourhood-forum-s-mn6z54/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}