Monetary Incentive and Travel Distance Elasticity in Health Result Acquisition
Acquiring diagnostic health results imposes logistical and opportunity costs on individuals, creating barriers to learning personal health status even when testing itself is free.
Picture this
Imagine a library offering free books, but located a few miles away. Many people will not bother to make the trip just to pick up a book; however, if the library pays visitors a small cash reward for coming in, attendance skyrockets. Combining modest financial rewards with placing mobile distribution centers closer to where people live dramatically increases the number of people who collect their information.
What the evidence says
78.2% of respondents received a non-zero incentive averaging $1.016 (SD $0.897) at an average distance of 1.993 km (SD 1.242 km), resulting in 72.9% overall individual results retrieval rate (72.3% village-level mean, SD 0.186).
- Who
- N = 2,654 individuals across 117 villages in rural Malawi in 2004.
- How
- Randomized field experiment offering financial incentives ($0 to $3) and varying location distance to mobile counseling centers.
What to do
Offer micro-financial incentives and deploy decentralized mobile health stations to lower logistical frictions and boost diagnostic result retrieval rates.
From the source
"After testing, respondents were offered randomly assigned monetary incentives to learn their HIV results ranging from zero to three dollars. Two months later the HIV test results were available at mobile counseling centers that were randomly located within the study sites."
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