 Paying More or Hassling Less? Experimental Evidence on Administrative Burdens, Incentives, and Grant Take-UpLeonhard K. Lades, Glenn McNamara and Margaret Samahita No 202608, Working Papers from School of Economics, University College Dublin Abstract: Applying for benefits and programs can be so onerous that take-up is low even when support is crucial to people’s lives. This study investigates how administrative burden and financial incentives influence the quality of the completion of an administrative task using an incentivized real-effort task. The experiment, with a sample of 1002 UK participants, asked individuals to identify key information from hypothetical grant descriptions that varied in administrative complexity in order to complete an incentivized quiz for either a low or a high potential prize. Higher administrative burden significantly reduced the quality of the administrative task completion, while higher monetary incentives produced only modest improvements. These findings suggest that reducing administrative burden, rather than increasing financial incentives alone, may be a more effective way to improve administrative performance and increase take-up across grants, benefits, and similar programs. Keywords: Administrative burden; Incentives; Real-effort task experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucn:wpaper:202608 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from School of Economics, University College Dublin Contact information at EDIRC. |
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