An Evaluation of Offering an Electronic Gift Card and a Second Incentive in a Web Survey

Abstract

Incentives are routinely used to increase response rates to surveys. Recent research demonstrates the effectiveness of offering a second prepaid incentive in the follow-up reminders. To extend the incentive research, we embedded a 2 by 2 experiment in a web survey to investigate the impact of offering an electronic gift card (vs. cash) as a prepaid incentive and the impact of splitting an initial $5 incentive to a combination of an initial incentive of $2 and a second incentive of $3 on response rate, sample composition, nonresponse bias in selected survey variables, and cost per completed interview. We found that offering an initial incentive of $2 and a second incentive of $3 led to a higher response rate and a lower nonresponse bias in survey estimates than offering an initial incentive of $5 and no second incentive when the incentive was offered as cash but not when the incentive was an Amazon.com Gift Card. Furthermore, the condition offering an initial cash incentive of $2 and a second cash incentive of $5 resulted in the largest share of respondents aged 18 to 49 and the lowest cost per complete. Implications of the findings are discussed.