Georg-Christoph Haas, Frauke Kreuter, Florian Keusch, Mark Trappmann, Sebastian Bähr
Effects of Incentives in Smartphone Data Collection

This chapter analyzes the effects of different incentive schemes on participation rates in a study combining self‐reports and passive data collection using smartphones, as well as breaks out these effects by economic subgroups. Providing some form of incentive, whether monetary or some other kind of token of appreciation, is common for studies recruiting respondents to answer survey questions. The chapter provides a brief review of the literature on the effectiveness of incentives and the postulated mechanisms explaining these effects. It explains the study design with an emphasis on the experimental conditions. The chapter also presents an analysis of the results of the study, including overall effects of the different incentive treatments on app installation, number of initially activated data‐sharing functions, deactivation of data‐sharing functions, retention of app, and overall costs of data collection.