research-article

Incentivising the Adoption of COVID-19 Contact-Tracing Apps: A Randomised Controlled Online Experiment on the German Corona-Warn-App

Authors:

Daniel SchnurrAuthors Info & Claims

SIGMIS-CPR '21: Proceedings of the 2021 Computers and People Research Conference

Pages 1 - 3

https://doi.org/10.1145/3458026.3462158

Published: 29 June 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Contact-tracing apps constitute a key pillar of many nations' public health strategy to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the effectiveness of digital contact-tracing depends crucially on widespread app installation and usage among citizens. Despite the large social benefits, evidence on the effectiveness of incentives to stimulate adoption of contact-tracing apps is scarce. Whereas monetary compensations for app installation or usage provide users with a direct economic benefit, research in related health domains has found that extrinsic incentives may crowd out intrinsic motivation and pro-social behaviour. Thus, we conduct a randomised controlled online experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of different incentive mechanisms in promoting the installation and usage of the German Corona-Warn-App (CWA). We find that monetary incentives are effective in significantly increasing verified app installations and app usage 14 days after installation, up to three times the usage without compensation. Deferred monetary compensation for verified usage yields lower installation rates than immediate monetary compensation for installation, but sustains the highest retention rate among adopters. Non-monetary compensation in the form of optional charity donations is found to be ineffective in promoting installations or usage beyond outcomes of monetary incentives, suggesting that there is no substantial crowding-out of intrinsic motives. This suggests that monetary incentives can serve as an important policy instrument to encourage the adoption of contact-tracing apps and contain the spread of COVID-19.

References

[1]

Katherine Baicker, David Cutler, and Zirui Song. 2010. Workplace wellness programs can generate savings. Health affairs, Vol. 29, 2 (2010), 304--311.

[2]

Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole. 2006. Incentives and prosocial behavior. American Economic Review, Vol. 96, 5 (2006), 1652--1678.

[3]

Patrick Beuth. 2020. Wer bekommt wie viel für die Corona-Warn-App? (2020). https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/apps/corona-warn-app-wie-erklaeren-sich-die-gesamtkosten-von-68-millionen-euro-a-56b5abe1-e0a6--4b1c-9177--9066df3d9b14 Retrieved February 11, 2021 from

[4]

Jean-Philippe Bonardi, Marius Brülhart, Jean-Pierre Danthine, Anshuman Saxena, Christian Thöni, Mathias Thoenig, and Christian Zehnder. 2020. How To Make Digital Proximity Tracing Work: The View from Economics. (2020). https://e4s.center/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/E4S_DigitalTracing_Full_EN.pdf Retrieved February 11, 2021 from

[5]

Gharad Bryan, Dean Karlan, and Scott Nelson. 2010. Commitment devices. Annu. Rev. Econ., Vol. 2, 1 (2010), 671--698.

[6]

Kathleen Chell, Tanya E Davison, Barbara Masser, and Kyle Jensen. 2018. A systematic review of incentives in blood donation. Transfusion, Vol. 58, 1 (2018), 242--254.

[7]

Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, Tarun Ramadorai, Tommaso Valletti, and Ansgar Walther. 2021. Privacy, adoption, and truthful reporting: A simple theory of contact tracing applications. Economics Letters, Vol. 198 (2021), 109676.

[8]

Edward L Deci. 1971. Effects of externally mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation. Journal of personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 18, 1 (1971), 105--115.

[9]

European Data Protection Supervisor. 2020. TechDispatch #1/2020: Contact Tracing with Mobile Applications. (2020). Available at https://edps.europa.eu/data-protection/our-work/publications/techdispatch/techdispatch-12020-contact-tracing-mobile_en.

[10]

Luca Ferretti, Chris Wymant, Michelle Kendall, Lele Zhao, Anel Nurtay, Lucie Abeler-Dörner, Michael Parker, David Bonsall, and Christophe Fraser. 2020. Quantifying SARS-CoV-2 transmission suggests epidemic control with digital contact tracing. Science, Vol. 368, 6491 (2020), eabb6936.

[11]

Thorsten Frei. 2020. Unionsfraktionsvize Frei fordert Steuervorteile für Corona-App-Nutzer. (2020). http://www.finanztreff.de/news/unionsfraktionsvize-frei-fordert-steuervorteile-fuer-corona-app-nutzer/20184006 Retrieved February 11, 2021 from

[12]

Bruno S Frey and Felix Oberholzer-Gee. 1997. The cost of price incentives: An empirical analysis of motivation crowding-out. The American Economic Review, Vol. 87, 4 (1997), 746--755.

[13]

Jemima A Frimpong and Stephane Helleringer. 2020. Financial Incentives for Downloading COVID--19 Digital Contact Tracing Apps. (2020). https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/9vp7x/ Retrieved February 11, 2021 from

[14]

Robert Hinch, W Probert, A Nurtay, M Kendall, C Wymant, Matthew Hall, and C Fraser. 2020. Effective configurations of a digital contact tracing app: A report to NHSX. (2020). https://cdn.theconversation.com/static_files/files/1009/Report_-_Effective_App_Configurations.pdf?1587531217

[15]

Nakyung Kyung, Hyeokkoo Eric Kwon, and T. (Ravi) Ravichandran. 2020. Walk for Whom? The Effectiveness of Egoistic and Philanthropic Incentive Designs for Mobile Health Interventions. In Proceedings of the 41st International Conference of Information Systems. Hyderabad, India, 1--17.

[16]

George Loewenstein, Troyen Brennan, and Kevin G Volpp. 2007. Asymmetric paternalism to improve health behaviors. JAMA, Vol. 298, 20 (2007), 2415--2417.

[17]

Mancur Olson. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, USA.

[18]

PH O'Neill. 2020. No, coronavirus apps don't need 60% adoption to be effective. (2020). https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/05/1002775/covid-apps-effective-at-less-than-60-percent-download/ Retrieved February 11, 2021 from

[19]

Kai Riemer, Raffaele Ciriello, Sandra Peter, and Daniel Schlagwein. 2020. Digital contact-tracing adoption in the COVID-19 pandemic: IT governance for collective action at the societal level. European Journal of Information Systems, Vol. 29, 6 (2020), 731--745.

[20]

Robert Koch Institut. 2020 Kennzahlen zur Corona-Warn-App. (2020). https://www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus/WarnApp/Archiv_Kennzahlen/Kennzahlen_18122020.pdf?__blob=publicationFile Retrieved February 11, 2021 from

[21]

Stefan Stepanovic and Tobias Mettler. 2020. Financial Incentives and Intention to Subscribe to Data-Driven Health Plans. In Proceedings of the 41st International Conference of Information Systems. Hyderabad, India, 1--17.

[22]

Richard Titmuss. 1970. The gift relationship .Allen and Unwin, London, UK.

[23]

Simon Trang, Manuel Trenz, Welf H Weiger, Monideepa Tarafdar, and Christy MK Cheung. 2020. One app to trace them all? Examining app specifications for mass acceptance of contact-tracing apps. European Journal of Information Systems, Vol. 29, 4 (2020), 1--14.

[24]

Christine Utz, Steffen Becker, Theodor Schnitzler, Florian M Farke, Franziska Herbert, Leonie Schaewitz, Martin Degeling, and Markus Dürmuth. 2020. Apps Against the Spread: Privacy Implications and User Acceptance of COVID-19-Related Smartphone Apps on Three Continents. (2020). https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.14245 Retrieved February 11, 2021 from

Cited By

Kowalewski MUtz CDegeling MSchnitzler THerbert FSchaewitz LFarke FBecker SDürmuth M(2023)52 Weeks Later: Attitudes Towards COVID-19 Apps for Different Purposes Over TimeProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100427:CSCW2(1-45)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610042
Isonne CDe Blasiis MTuratto FMazzalai EMarzuillo CDe Vito CVillari PBaccolini V(2022)What Went Wrong with the IMMUNI Contact-Tracing App in Italy? A Cross-Sectional Survey on the Attitudes and Experiences among Healthcare University StudentsLife10.3390/life1206087112:6(871)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.3390/life12060871
Kulyk OBritton-Steele LPaja EDuckert MBarkhuus L(2022)#34;You have been in Close Contact with a Person Infected with COVID-19 and you may have been Infected#34;Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35467396:MHCI(1-27)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3546739

Index Terms

Incentivising the Adoption of COVID-19 Contact-Tracing Apps: A Randomised Controlled Online Experiment on the German Corona-Warn-App

Recommendations

Corona-warn-app: tracing the start of the official COVID-19 exposure notification app for germany
SIGCOMM '20: Proceedings of the SIGCOMM '20 Poster and Demo Sessions

On June 16, 2020, Germany launched an open-source smartphone contact tracing app ("Corona-Warn-App") to help tracing SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) infection chains. It uses a decentralized, privacy-preserving design based on the Exposure Notification APIs in ...
Incentivizing exploration
EC '14: Proceedings of the fifteenth ACM conference on Economics and computation

We study a Bayesian multi-armed bandit (MAB) setting in which a principal seeks to maximize the sum of expected time-discounted rewards obtained by pulling arms, when the arms are actually pulled by selfish and myopic individuals. Since such individuals ...
What makes people install a COVID-19 contact-tracing app? Understanding the influence of app design and individual difference on contact-tracing app adoption intention
Abstract
Smartphone-based contact-tracing apps are a promising solution to help scale up the conventional contact-tracing process. However, low adoption rates have become a major issue that prevents these apps from achieving their full ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SIGMIS-CPR '21: Proceedings of the 2021 Computers and People Research Conference

June 2021

104 pages

ISBN:9781450384063

DOI:10.1145/3458026

General Chairs:
Sven Laumer
Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
,
Damien Joseph
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
,
Program Chairs:
Daniel Beimborn
University of Bamberg, Germany
,
Leigh Ellen Potter
Griffith University, Australia
,
Jeria Quesenberry
Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Copyright © 2021 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGMIS: ACM Special Interest Group on Management Information Systems

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 June 2021

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts

Conference

SIGMIS-CPR '21

Sponsor:

SIGMIS

SIGMIS-CPR '21: 2021 Computers and People Research Conference

June 30, 2021

Virtual Event, Germany

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 300 of 480 submissions, 63%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

3
Total Citations
View Citations
257
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)13
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 27 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Kowalewski MUtz CDegeling MSchnitzler THerbert FSchaewitz LFarke FBecker SDürmuth M(2023)52 Weeks Later: Attitudes Towards COVID-19 Apps for Different Purposes Over TimeProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100427:CSCW2(1-45)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610042
Isonne CDe Blasiis MTuratto FMazzalai EMarzuillo CDe Vito CVillari PBaccolini V(2022)What Went Wrong with the IMMUNI Contact-Tracing App in Italy? A Cross-Sectional Survey on the Attitudes and Experiences among Healthcare University StudentsLife10.3390/life1206087112:6(871)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.3390/life12060871
Kulyk OBritton-Steele LPaja EDuckert MBarkhuus L(2022)#34;You have been in Close Contact with a Person Infected with COVID-19 and you may have been Infected#34;Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35467396:MHCI(1-27)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3546739

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten