Overview
This study was part of a project aiming to understand how to improve medication safety in primary care clinic settings. We conducted a survey-based experiment on the impact of simulated incentives on willingness to engage in a targeted behavior that supports medication review: bringing medications to the clinic at each visit. We used a crowdsourcing platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), to conduct the experiment. The experiment used “role-playing” methodologies in marketing science [The study was designed to evaluate whether web-based crowdsourcing surveys could be used to assess the effectiveness of interventions based on behavioral economic principles. Feasibility was measured by examining whether web-based participants responded to simulated incentives in the same way they would have responded to actual incentives. Specifically, we examined whether the treatment effect for simulated incentives was in the same direction and statistically significant as the treatment effect for actual incentives. This approach allowed us to determine the feasibility of using simulated incentives as a proxy for actual incentives in behavioral economics–based interventions. The study also aimed to provide insights into the impact of interventions by using role-playing scenarios, which were tested on MTurk.