The article "Data Donations for Digital Contact Tracing: Short- and Long-Term Effects of Monetary Incentives" by Vicotria Fast and Daniel Schnurr was published in the journal Information Systems Research (external link, opens in a new window).
The study examines the conditions under which people are willing to donate personal data for charitable purposes, such as fighting the pandemic. Using an online experiment on the use of the German Corona-Warn-App, the article shows that monetary incentives are effective in the short term: They significantly increase app installations as well as the willingness to donate data. However, this effect is not sustainable. Eight months after installation, users with a financial incentive do not donate more data than people who participated out of intrinsic motivation. One-off payments are therefore not enough to encourage long-term commitment. The study also shows that hypothetical surveys can overestimate the actual willingness to donate.
The research project was funded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and Art (external link, opens in a new window) and the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (external link, opens in a new window). The Chair of Machine Learning and Uncertainty Quantification, continues to conduct intensive research on the topic of data donations in the DataDonations4SustainableChange project.
