Increasing the Reach of Snowball Sampling: The Impact of Fixed versus Lottery Incentives

ABSTRACT Though many researchers have studied how to incentivize people to respond to surveys, little is known about how these incentives impact respondents' willingness to recruit others to participate as well. In this paper, we show that the incentives offered for individual survey responses can have a dramatic impact on the overall reach of a survey through a network of peers. In a field experiment in India, we made a survey accessible via mobile phones and offered respondents either a fixed incentive (guaranteed payment of about $0.17) or a lottery incentive (1$17). When asked to choose, a significant fraction of respondents preferred the lottery incentive. However, when encouraged to spread the survey, the fixed incentive spread over 100 times further, reaching about 800 people in a day. We interpret this surprising result and discuss the implications for HCI

Les clips de musique régionale indienne, dreamcatchers d’une économie de l’attention

L’industrie musicale du Garhwal (Inde du Nord) produit des clips de variété en dialecte régional qui circulent en partie sur Internet. Ces vidéos apparaissent comme le support d’une écoute engagée : elles fédèrent les auditeurs de différents milieux géographiques et socioprofessionnels, dont les échanges autour de la musique nourrissent des liens interpersonnels et des débats esthétiques ou éthiques. Les clips sont diffusés sur des sites de streaming comme YouTube, mais aussi sur des sites informatifs dédiés au Garhwal et enfin sur des pages personnelles et des blogs, où l’on remarque que les auditeurs expatriés sont particulièrement attachés à l’évaluation culturelle et politique des clips régionaux. Cette écoute chargée émotionnellement et idéologiquement porte différents enjeux pour les distributeurs et les créateurs : si tous les acteurs trouvent une gratification dans la capacité des clips à concentrer l’attention, leurs moyens (notamment légaux) de valorisation de cette attention sont très inégaux.The music industry of the Garhwali area (North India) produces popular music clips that are sung in the regional dialect and broadcasted mainly on the Internet. Such videos appear to be a medium for the commitment of listeners: they federate viewers from various geographical and socio-professional backgrounds, whose music-oriented exchanges foster interpersonal connections as well as aesthetic or ethical debates. Garhwali clips are uploaded on streaming websites such as YouTube, but also on informative websites that focus on Garhwal or on personal pages and blogs. On all such platforms, it appears that those listeners who live abroad or outside Garhwal are particularly keen on commenting the political and cultural content displayed in music clips. This listening practice is charged both emotionally and ideologically, so that it poses several challenges to both distributors and creators: whereas all members of the music industry benefit from the clips’ capacity to capture the consumers’ attention, not all of them are equally able to generate value from this attention, especially in terms of legal leverage