Suppose you want to collect some kind of data from a population, but people vary widely in their willingness to provide the data (eg maybe you want to conduct a 30 minute phone survey but some people really dislike phone calls or have much higher hourly wages this funges against).
One thing you could do is offer to pay everyone X dollars for data collection. But this will only capture the people whose cost of providing data is below X, which will distort your sample.
Here's another proposal: ask everyone for their fair price to provide the data. If they quote you Y, pay them 2Y to collect the data with probability (X2Y)2, or X with certainty if they quote you a value less than X/2. (If your RNG doesn't return yes, do nothing.) Then upweight the data from your randomly-chosen respondents in inverse proportion to the odds that they were selected. You can do a bit of calculus to see that this scheme incentivizes respondents to quote their fair value, and will provide an expected surplus of max(X2/4Y,X−Y) dollars to a respondent who disvalues providing data at Y.
Now you have an unbiased sample of your population and you'll pay at most NX dollars in expectation if you reach out to N people. The cost is that you'll have a noisier sample of the high-reluctance population, but that's a lot better than definitely having none of that population in your study.
This is probably too complicated to explain to the general population
I think it's workable.
No one ever internalises the exact logic of a game the first time they hear the rules (unless they've played very similar games before). A good teacher gives them several levels of approximation, then they play at the level they're comfortable with. Here's the level of approximation I'd start with, which I think is good enough.
"How much would we need to pay you for you to be happy to take the survey? Your data may really be worth that much to us, we really want to ma... (read more)