To get the industry on board, servicers get to collect a $2,500 up-front incentive payment per refinancing, and lenders who originate the new Hope for Homeowners loans are eligible for "success fees" of up to $1,000 per year for up to three years, so long as the refinanced loan doesn't default.
On the contrary, by using up-front incentive payments it was possible to save both staff and postage costs.
Up-front incentive payments can thus initiate an exchange that influences people to feel obligated to complete the survey.
A meta-analysis study on mail survey response rates found an overall response rate of 53.0 % for up-front incentive payment and 41.1 % for delayed incentive payments [ 7].
There was no difference in response rates of a mailed survey between up-front incentive and delayed payment in prostate cancer survivors [ 21] and breast cancer survivors [ 22].
Previous studies have adopted the social exchange theory to explain up-front incentive payments can increase response rates [ 6, 10, 11].
The finding of the Cochrane review and Church's meta-analysis suggested that up-front incentive payment could significantly increase the response rate of postal surveys [ 7, 9].
Accepting an up-front incentive payment without answering the subsequent telephone survey might make people feel guilty, according to the norm of reciprocity in the social exchange theory [ 6, 10, 11, 15].
A meta-analysis on the effects of incentive payment in cross-sectional postal surveys found that compared to delayed incentive payments, up-front incentive payments can increase the response rates of 11.9 percentage [ 7].
Subjects were assigned to either the up-front incentive payment group or delayed incentive payment group by simple randomization on a 1 1 basis with random numbers generated by a computer.
For the $2 "up-front" incentive we randomly selected 500 potential enrollers who had already returned a questionnaire, and sent them a brand-new, crisp $2 bill, a thank you letter, and a questionnaire to give to a friend, church member, or family member to complete.
