Quasi-Cash Incentive Effects and Facebook Recruitment in Sub-Saharan Africa: Insights from Nigeria

Increasingly, scholars are using Facebook to conduct online survey research in Sub-Saharan Africa, usually offering airtime reimbursement (see e.g., Olamijuwon, 2021; Rosenzweig & Zhou, 2021). Such a mobile ‘top-up’ functions as an easily transmittable, quasi-cash incentive. Yet, so far, these studies did not examine the effectiveness of these mobile top-ups in generating survey participation. More generally, only few incentive experiments have been conducted focussing on the sub-continent in contrast to Western settings (for exceptions, see Langer et al., 2017; Meuleman et al., 2018). By offering conditional incentives of different values of airtime credit, we aim to examine the effectiveness of these quasi-cash incentives among a sample of Nigerian citizens recruited using Facebook. Besides the incentive experiment, this study will also assess the success of Facebook recruitment in terms of the representativeness of the final sample compared to Nigerian demographics.