1. ¹Aston University, Birmingham, UK
2. ²Bradford University, Bradford, UK
3. ³City University, London, UK

Correspondence: J Saunders, Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK. E-mail: j.a.saunders@aston.ac.uk

Received October 2004; Accepted June 2005; Published online 23 November 2005.

Abstract

Increasing mail-survey response using monetary incentives is a proven, but not always cost-effective method in every population. This paper tackles the questions of whether it is worth using monetary incentives and the size of the inducement by testing a logit model of the impact of prepaid monetary incentives on response rates in consumer and organizational mail surveys. The results support their use and show that the inducement value makes a significant impact on the effect size. Importantly, no significant differences were found between consumer and organizational populations. A cost–benefit model is developed to estimate the optimum incentive when attempting to minimize overall survey costs for a given sample size.