Data Donations for Digital Contact Tracing (Fast & Schnurr, 2025) | FT50 ISR

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🎙️ Welcome to another episode of Revise and Resubmit! 🎙️

Where research gets real, and the footnotes get funky 📚✨

Today, we’re tracing something more invisible than the virus itself—motivation.
💸 What happens when you offer people money to care about public health?
🤳 Do incentives work when data is the currency, and trust is the cost?

In a world reeling from COVID-19, governments rushed to roll out contact-tracing apps—but adoption was never guaranteed.
Enter the bold question:

💰 Can monetary incentives nudge people to donate their personal data for the greater good?
🧠 And more importantly—do those nudges last?

📄 In today’s spotlight:
“Data Donations for Digital Contact Tracing: Short- and Long-Term Effects of Monetary Incentives”
By the brilliant minds Victoria Fast and Daniel Schnurr.
🧪 Published in Information Systems Research—a prestigious FT50 journal 🏆—on June 23, 2025, by none other than INFORMS.

Through a clever randomized experiment, they tested whether cash boosts commitment or simply masks it.
💥 Spoiler alert: The money works like espresso—💨 quick jolt, no staying power.
In the short run? App installs skyrocket, and data donors triple! 🚀
But fast-forward eight months... and many of those same users? Ghosted the app. 👻

Why?
😓 Opportunity costs.
😑 Lack of perceived benefits.
🌀 No real habits formed.

So, what’s the takeaway? One-time payments might bring people to the table—but they don’t keep them there. 🍽️

Now here’s the twist we leave you with:
👉 If cash can't buy long-term commitment, what can? 🧐

💬 Huge thanks to the authors Victoria Fast and Daniel Schnurr, and to INFORMS, for publishing this timely and vital research in Information Systems Research, one of the top-tier, FT50-listed journals in the world. 🌍📈

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Until next time… stay curious, stay critical, and never stop revising. 🔁✍️
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Reference

Fast, V., & Schnurr, D. (2025). Data Donations for Digital Contact Tracing: Short- and Long-Term Effects of Monetary Incentives. Information Systems Research. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2021.0575

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