Incentives. Relative to other strategies for increasing response rates in Web surveys, many studies have examined the use of incentives, Much of this work is summarized in a meta-analysis by Géritz (2006a; see also Géritz, 2010). Across 32 experimental studies, she found that incentives significantly increased the propor- tion of invitees who started the survey (with an average odds ratio for the incentive effect of 1.19). But what types of incentives are most effective? The general findings in the survey literature are that prepaid incentives are more effective than promised or conditional ones, and that cash incentives are more effective than altematives such as in-kind incentives, prize draws, sweepstakes, loyalty points, and the like (see Church, 1993; Singer, 2002). Despite this, sweepstakes or loyalty-point incentives, conditional on completion, are popular in Web surveys, especially among volunteer panels. There are several reasons why Web researchers prefer conditional incentives to prepaid ones and noncash incentives to cash. First, prepaid cash incentives cannot be delivered electronically; they require mailing addresses and entail more expen- sive processing and mailing of materials. Second, if the response rate is likely to be in the single digits (as is often the case), the return on investment may be low (but see Alexander, Divine, Couper, McClure, Stopponi, Fortman, Tolsma, Strecher, and Johnson, 2008, discussed below). Third, as Géritz (2006b) notes, the costs of sweep- stakes are usually capped, since the size of the prize stays the same regardless of how many people participate, This makes it easier to manage survey costs. Although sweepstakes and loyalty points are attractive to the researchers, are they effective in encouraging response from sample persons? Giritz (2006a) found that sweepstakes incentives produced higher response rates than no incentives in her meta-analysis of 27 experimental studies involving sweep- stakes, most of them based on commercial panels. However, in a meta-analysis of six incentive experiments in a nonprofit (academic) panel, she found that offering a cash sweepstakes provided no significant benefit over no incentive at all (Goritz, 2006b), Thus, while sweepstakes may be better than nothing, at least for commercial panels, it is not clear whether they are better than alternative incentive strategies. In one of the few studies comparing different types of incentives, Bosnjak and ‘Tuten (2002) conducted an experiment in a survey among real estate agents and brokers for whom they had email addresses. They tested four incentive types: 1) $2 prepaidvia PayPal with the lirst coniact produced a 14-3 response rate; 2) $2 promised via PayPal upon completion produced a 15.9 percent response rate; 3) a prize draw for two $50 and four $25 prizes upon completion produced a 23.4 percent response rate; and 4) a control group with no incentive produced 12.9 response rate. One reason why the prize draw may have outperformed the prepaid and promised incen- tives is that cash was not used for the latter; for the PayPal incentive to be of value, one had to have a PayPal account. Another study (Birnholtz, Horn, Finholt, and Bae, 2004) compared 1) a mail invitation with $5 cash, 2) a mail invitation with a $5 Amazon.com gift certificate, and 3) an email invitation with a $5 Amazon.com e-certificate in a sample of engineering faculty and students at 20 universities. The study found the highest response rate (56.9 percent) for the cash incentive group, followed by the mail (40.0 percent) and email gift certificate groups (32.4 percent). This study suggests that cash outperforms a gift certificate (consistent with the ear- lier literature on survey incentives) and isalso consistent with the studies showing an advantage of mail over email invitations, Alexander and her colleagues (2008) conducted an incentive experiment as part of the recruitment effort for an online health intervention. Invitations to enroll online were sent by mail to members of a health maintenance organization, ‘The experiment tested six different enrollment incentives: no incentive, prepaid incentives of $1, $2, or $5, and promised incentives of $10 or $20. The highest enrollment rates were for the three prepaid incentive groups, with 7.7 percent enrolling with the $5 incen- tive, 6.9 percent with the $2 incentive, and 3.9 percent with the $1 incentive. The promised incentives produced enrollment rates of 3.4 percent with the $10 promised incentive and 3.3 percent with the $20 promised incentive. The no-incentive group had a 2.7 percent enrollment rate. This provides further evidence in support of the effectiveness of prepaid incentives in online surveys. In terms of cost. the $5 prepaid group cost approximately $77.73 per enrolled case, the $2 prepaid group cost about $43.37, the $1 prepaid group $51.25, the no-incentive group $36.70, the $10 prom- ised group $41.09, and the $20 promised group $50.94. Despite the relatively low enrollment rates, a small prepaid incentive (a $2 bill) proved cost-effective relative to the promised incentives, though not compared to no incentiv This brief review suggests that incentives seem to work for Web surveys in pretty much the same way as in other modes of data collection and for pretty much the same reasons. Although itis impractical for Web panels to send mail invitations with prepaid incentives when they are sending tens of thousands of invitations a day, the combination of an advance letter, a small prepaid cash incentive, and an emai tation may be most effective for lis-based samples, 's at all