In Simple Words
Imagine hosting a free community budgeting workshop where almost no one attends because travel costs and lost work hours outweigh interest. Offering a small travel stipend offsets those immediate friction costs, causing attendance to jump dramatically.
Migrant households near Cabanatuan
- No education or product-access offer
- Group used for comparison
- Financial education offer
- Workshop attendance 41.4 percentage points higher
Whole encouragement package, with cash incentives and revisits introduced partway through. Incentives were not separately randomized; no pure cash effect.
See source →Research question
Voluntary participation in financial education workshops and adoption of formal financial products in field experiments frequently suffer from severe initial non-attendance and low take-up due to participant opportunity costs.
Participants
N = 1,800 transnational households in Cabanatuan City and surrounding localities, Philippines.
Study Design
Randomized encouragement design modified mid-study to provide cash compensation (PHP 500 / ~$11 for a 6-8 hour workshop; PHP 100 / ~$2 for financial product enrollment) following near-zero initial take-up.
Results
Unincentivized workshop participation yielded only 36 attendees out of 487 invited and 4 savings account sign-ups out of 438; adding financial incentives and revisits boosted final workshop participation to 38.9%–41.4% (p < 0.01) and micro-insurance take-up to 25.1%–28.0% (p < 0.01).
Takeaway
Budget and deploy direct participant compensation (such as attendance stipends) when launching field interventions to overcome initial adoption friction and achieve adequate statistical power.