The effectiveness of incentives on recruitment and retention rates: an experiment in a web survey

The purpose of this project is to examine the effect of different incentive levels on long term participation of respondents in an online panel. Afer the recruitment of a refreshment sample in the LISS panel, a random half (about 1000 households) of the refreshment sample was paid a higher monetary payment for completing monthly questionnaires than the regular payment. The other half of the newly recruited sample was paid the standard incentive per questionnaire. We study the relation between the per questionnaire incentive level and long term participation and attrition.