Exploring micro-incentive strategies for participant compensation in high-burden studies

Authors:
Mohamed Musthag;Andrew Raij;Deepak Ganesan;Santosh Kumar;Saul Shiffman
Affiliations:
University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA;University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA;University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA;University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA;University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Ubiquitous computing
Year:
2011

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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.