The Effect of Differential Incentives on Attrition Bias: Evidence from the PASS Wave 3 Incentive Experiment

Felderer, Barbara; Müller, Gerrit; Kreuter, Frauke und Winter, Joachim (2018): The Effect of Differential Incentives on Attrition Bias: Evidence from the PASS Wave 3 Incentive Experiment. In: Field Methods, Vol. 30, No. 1: pp. 56-69

Abstract

Respondent incentives are widely used to increase response rates, but their effect on nonresponse bias has not been researched as much. To contribute to the research, we analyze an incentive experiment embedded within the third wave of the German household panel survey Panel Labor Market and Social Security conducted by the German Institute for Employment Research. Our question is whether attrition bias differs in two incentive plans. In particular, we want to study whether an unconditional Euro10 cash incentive yields less attrition bias in self-reported labor income and other sociodemographics than a conditional lottery ticket incentive. We find that unconditional cash incentives are more effective than conditional lottery tickets in reducing attrition bias in income and several sociodemographic variables.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Economics
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 330 Economics
• ISSN: 1525-822X
• Alliance/National Licence: This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.
• Language: English