Economics, work and decisions · 1 min read
Higher pay brought more people back, but not better answers
With higher pay, more workers on an online platform completed follow-up. Response quality did not improve.
The study, in plain language
The experiment varied the initial payment and the increase offered for a second survey. The team then examined three outcomes: how well people responded, how they perceived the payment, and who completed follow-up.
Completing follow-up was more common among those paid more at first and offered a larger increase for the second stage. In contrast, there was no convincing evidence that payments improved overall performance. Perceptions of choice, fairness, and compensation varied by measure and stage: each question showed a different pattern.
The key idea
Higher pay brought more people back. The answers did not clearly improve.
The original study
Pay for performance, satisfaction and retention in longitudinal crowdsourced research
Source under CC0 1.0. English adaptation and explanation by PaperFlow, with AI assistance. The text has been reorganized for a general audience; it is not the complete paper and does not imply endorsement by its authors.
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