Not Much Bang for the Buck: Implementing a Pre Paid Incentive on a National Survey of Disability Beneficiaries
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Round 8 of the Social Security Administration’s National Beneficiary Survey, administered in 2023, included a random assignment experiment to test the effect of offering a prepaid incentive of $2 to sample members in the initial outreach letter. The findings suggest that overall, the $2 prepaid incentive increased the survey completion rate by 1.6 percentage points (p = 0.02). The increase in the completion rate was concentrated among males (a statistically significant 3 percentage-point increase). We found no significant differences in the impact of the incentive by age, disability program, or impairment. Given the cost to implement the incentive, the relatively small increase in completion rates, and the potential for only modest cost reductions in the data collection effort, the findings suggest that implementing a prepaid incentive is not cost-effective for the National Beneficiary Survey.
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