Abstract

In many situations a person naturally gives time to follow something of interest to him, to buy an item, to read, to participate in sport, even to travel. When we deal with a survey, however, we are asking the person to take on a job, albeit a job for a limited time, with very little recompense, no benefits, and simply the joy of doing something for someone else. From our study we see that there are three distinct mind-sets; those who want ‘stuff/money’ in return, those who want to be ‘experts’ (money helps here as well, however), and those who want to have an easy survey and seem willing to donate their time without any recompense. The nature of the reward changes with the topic of the survey, even though the surveys are all equally long. Interesting topics need less reward than boring topics.