Invitation Messages for Business Surveys: A Multi-Armed Bandit Experiment

Johannes J. Gaul, Florian Keusch (), Davud Rostam-Afschar and Thomas Simon ()
Additional contact information
Johannes J. Gaul: ZEW
Florian Keusch: University of Mannheim
Thomas Simon: University of Mannheim

No 17534, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This study investigates how elements of a survey invitation message targeted to businesses influence their participation in a self-administered web survey. We implement a full factorial experiment varying five key components of the email invitation. Unlike traditional experimental setups with static group composition, however, we employ adaptive randomization in our sequential research design. Specifically, as the experiment progresses, a Bayesian learning algorithm assigns more observations to invitation messages with higher starting rates. Our results indicate that personalizing the message, emphasizing the authority of the sender, and pleading for help increase survey starting rates, while stressing strict privacy policies and changing the location of the survey URL have no response-enhancing effect. The implementation of adaptive randomization is useful for other applications of survey design and methodology.

Keywords: adaptive randomization; reinforcement learning; nonresponse; email invitation; web survey; firm survey; organizational survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C11 C44 C93 D83 M00 M40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2024-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp17534.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Invitation messages for business surveys: A multi-armed bandit experiment (2025)
Working Paper: Invitation Messages for Business Surveys: A Multi-Armed Bandit Experiment (2024)
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:iza:izadps:dp17534

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().