Exploring micro-incentive strategies for participant compensation in high-burden studies
Abstract
Micro-incentives represent a new but little-studied trend in participant compensation for user studies. In this paper, we use a combination of statistical analysis and models from labor economics to evaluate three canonical micro-payment schemes in the context of high-burden user studies, where participants wear sensors for extended durations. We look at how these strategies affect compliance, data quality, and retention, and show that when used carefully, micro-payments can be highly beneficial. We find that data quality is different across the micro-incentive schemes we experimented with, and therefore the incentive strategy should be chosen with care. We think that adaptive micro-payment based incentives can be used to successfully incentivize future studies at much lower cost to the study designer, while ensuring high compliance, good data quality, and lower retention issues. © 2011 ACM.
Publication Title
UbiComp'11 - Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing
Recommended Citation
Musthag, M., Raij, A., Ganesan, D., Kumar, S., & Shiffman, S. (2011). Exploring micro-incentive strategies for participant compensation in high-burden studies. UbiComp'11 - Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, 435-444. https://doi.org/10.1145/2030112.2030170
