Data Donations for Digital Contact Tracing: Short- and Long-Term Effects of Monetary Incentives
研究了货币激励对德国新冠接触追踪应用安装和短期数据捐赠有显著促进作用，但长期来看激励效果消失，捐赠率与无激励组无显著差异。
Practice- and Policy-Oriented Abstract Data donations promise to unlock the social benefits of personal data. Recently, contact-tracing apps were developed to collect data from individuals to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Because the success of these apps depends on widespread adoption and continuous data collection, we evaluate the effectiveness of monetary incentive mechanisms at promoting verified installations of the German Corona-Warn-App and short- and long-term data donations. We find monetary incentives are effective in the short term: They significantly increase app installations and short-term data donations, tripling the number of data donors after 14 days compared to no compensation. However, the positive stimulus of monetary incentives vanishes in the long term: After eight months, installers in treatments with monetary incentives are significantly more likely to have stopped donating data than intrinsically motivated installers who did not receive monetary incentives, as a consequence of experienced opportunity costs and a lack of perceived benefits. Consequently, long-term data donation rates are not significantly higher in treatments with monetary incentives. This suggests one-time payments are ineffective at promoting long-term data donations, as the short-term crowding-in of less intrinsically motivated installers is difficult to sustain when passive app usage limits opportunities for habit formation and convincing users of contact-tracing benefits.