Incentives for User Participation

Craig Wills <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.web.chi-web
Message-ID <[email protected]>
We're involved with a project where we would like home users to run testing
software with the results of the tests providing data about the performance
of users' networked applications of interest (browsing, streaming, VoIP,
gaming, etc).  As an incentive for user participation we would like to
provide feedback to each user on their results, which we think they will
find useful.

My question is whether anyone has any experience or can point at any source
about the effectiveness of feedback as an incentive?  More generally, what
is known about the effectiveness of incentives (money, prizes, chances to
win, others) in getting users to participate in online data gathering
exercises such as surveys?

Thanks for any advice/pointers.
				- Craig Wills
				  Associate Professor
				  Computer Science Department
				  Worcester Polytechnic Institute
				  100 Institute Road
				  Worcester, MA 01609 USA
				  office (508)831-5622
				  fax (508)831-5776
				  [email protected]
				  http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~cew/

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