Question

The School District of Philadelphia wants to encourage teachers to fill out an “end-of-year” survey designed to elicit their feedback about various issues affecting schools. The survey is one of the primary channels through which the school district learns about what is happening in schools across the city, and increasing engagement is a key policy priority for the city. The School District has already created the survey and plans to send out the survey in an email to its 8,062 teachers. The District is willing to manipulate the messaging content in the email that will be sent out and/or provide rewards and incentives for survey completion. (They have up to $3,000 to spend.) Using your knowledge of behavioral economics, what would you suggest they do to maximize survey response rates? Be as specific as possible and justify your choices.  

Answer 1

As per behavioral economics, monetary reward can be a very big motivator for a lot of people. And the incentive to receive more money than what is expected can really motivate people to perform certain tasks. So this is how the incentive should be given to maximise response rates:

Maximum amount every teacher could receive = 3000/ 8062 = $ 0.37

The email would read like:

"We have sent this mail to 8062 teachers. For every teacher who successfully completes the survey, he/she would receive $ 0.20 . However, if we receive at least 4000 responses, we would increase the payout and every teacher would rather receive $ 0.37 per completed survey. We will be sharing the final results in a week's time in our next email to you all"

The rationale behind such an incentive plan is that every teacher would be willing to fill the survey and would try to make a contribution in reaching the target of minimum number of responses (that is 4000 in our case). Thus, increased monetary incentive would surely motivate the teachers.