The effect of economic incentives and cooperation messages on user participation in crowdsourced public transport technologies

Jacqueline Arriagada (), Claudio Mena (), Marcela Munizaga () and Daniel Schwartz ()
Additional contact information
Jacqueline Arriagada: Transapp
Claudio Mena: University of Chile
Marcela Munizaga: Institute of Complex Engineering Systems
Daniel Schwartz: Institute of Complex Engineering Systems

Transportation, 2023, vol. 50, issue 5, No 3, 1585-1612

Abstract: Abstract Transport data is crucial for transport planning and operations. Collecting high-quality data has long been challenging due to the difficulty of achieving adequate spatiotemporal coverage within a representative sample. The increasingly integrated use of Information and Communication technologies in transport systems offers an opportunity to collect data using non-traditional methods. Crowdsourcing applications are an example where a community of users shares information about their travel experience. However, crowdsourcing applications depend on a critical mass of users providing feedback. We conducted a large-scale field experiment to examine the effect of economic incentives (a lottery for free trips) and cooperation messages (asking users to help the community) to encourage users to share reports about bus stop conditions using a crowdsourcing app. We found that offering an economic incentive increased the participation rate almost three times compared to a control group, which did not receive any message. This positive effect lasted for several weeks but decreased over time, especially for users who had not made reports prior to the experiment. This incentive also increased the number of reports shared by users. Using a cooperation message, with or without the economic incentive, also increased the participation rate compared to the control group, but adding a cooperation message decreased the effect of a standalone economic incentive.

Keywords: Crowdsourcing app; Public transport; Transport data; Field experiment; Contribution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11116-022-10288-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:transp:v:50:y:2023:i:5:d:10.1007_s11116-022-10288-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11116/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11116-022-10288-7

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation is currently edited by Kay W. Axhausen

More articles in Transportation from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().