Cash is not king in incentivizing online surveys

ABSTRACT

We analyse the effect of different incentive structures on response rates for an online survey of New Zealand landowners who have previously not responded to an earlier wave of the survey. We find response rates are lowest for direct cash payment, lower even than for a control group with no incentive, which may be due to direct payment extinguishing any warm glow people receive from the charitable act of completing a survey. Lottery and charitable donation incentives do not increase response rates relative to a control group with no incentive.

KEYWORDS:

• Survey response rates
• incentives
• field experiment
• cash payment

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C83
• C93
• D64

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ Prepayment is a small payment sent out with the solicitation. Post-payment is a payment received conditional upon completing the survey.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research.