Data Donations for Digital Contact Tracing: Short- and Long-Term Effects of Monetary Incentives
Information Systems Research · 2026 · Volume 37 · Issue 1
Abstract
Data donations promise to unlock the social benefits of personal data. Recently, contact-tracing apps were developed to collect contact and health data from individuals to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Compared with commercial apps, the adoption of contact-tracing apps involves a unique cost-benefit calculus. The prosocial motives to engage in data donations, a mix of short- and long-term costs, and the need for continuous, yet mostly passive, app usage render digital contact tracing a novel information systems adoption setting. Because the effectiveness of contact-tracing apps hinges on widespread adoption and continuous data collection, we use a randomized controlled online experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of different monetary incentive mechanisms at promoting verified installations of the German Corona-Warn-App and short- and long-term data donations. We find that monetary incentives are effective in the short term, with no evidence of a crowding-out of prosocial motivations: Monetary incentives significantly increase app installations and short-term data donations, tripling the number of data donors after 14 days compared with a no-compensation treatment. However, the positive stimulus of monetary incentives vanishes in the long term: After eight months, installers in treatments with monetary incentives are significantly more likely to have stopped donating data than intrinsically motivated installers who did not receive monetary incentives, as a consequence of experienced opportunity costs and a lack of perceived benefits. Consequently, long-term data donation rates are not significantly higher in treatments with monetary incentives. This suggests that one-time payments are ineffective at promoting long-term data donations, as the short-term crowding-in of less intrinsically motivated installers is difficult to sustain when passive app usage limits opportunities for habit formation and convincing users of contact-tracing benefits. Finally, we present experimental evidence that empirical analyses based on hypothetical scenarios without verified actions are prone to overestimating individuals’ prosocial behavior in data donation contexts. History: Alessandro Acquisti, Senior Editor; Choon-Ling Sia, Associate Editor. Funding: Financial support from the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation, an institute of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities; and the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2021.0575 .
Keywords
data donation, data altruism, contact-tracing apps, app adoption, incentives, prosocial behavior, experiment, behavioral economics, COVID-19
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