Incentives in surveys

Aurélien Baillon; Han Bleichrodt; Georg D. Granic

doi:10.1016/j.joep.2022.102552

Incentives in surveys

Aurélien Baillon^*, Han Bleichrodt, Georg D. Granic

^*Corresponding author for this work

Applied Economics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

Surveys typically use hypothetical questions to measure subjective and unverifiable concepts like happiness and quality of life. We test whether this is problematic using a large survey experiment on health and subjective well-being. We use Prelec's Bayesian truth serum to incentivize the experiment and defaults to introduce biases in responses. Without defaults, the data quality was good and incentives had no impact. With defaults, incentives reduced default biases in the subjective well-being questions by inducing participants to spend more effort. Incentives had no impact on the health questions regardless of whether defaults were used.

Original language	English
Article number	102552
Journal	Journal of Economic Psychology
Volume	93
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2022.102552 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2022.102552
Publication status	Published - Dec 2022

Bibliographical note

☆ We would like to thank Martijn Burger, Daniele Nosenzo, and Drazen Prelec for helpful comments. We also thank participants at the ESA World Meeting in Berlin, IMEBESS 2019, and the DFG PsychoEconomics workshop. This research was made possible by a Vidi grant (452-13-013) of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Internal Review Board approval: 2020/02/04-42584aba by ERIM – Section Experiments. Data are available at https://doi.org/10.25397/eur.20422017.v1.

Publisher Copyright:© 2022 The Authors

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abstract = "Surveys typically use hypothetical questions to measure subjective and unverifiable concepts like happiness and quality of life. We test whether this is problematic using a large survey experiment on health and subjective well-being. We use Prelec's Bayesian truth serum to incentivize the experiment and defaults to introduce biases in responses. Without defaults, the data quality was good and incentives had no impact. With defaults, incentives reduced default biases in the subjective well-being questions by inducing participants to spend more effort. Incentives had no impact on the health questions regardless of whether defaults were used.",

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Incentives in surveys

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