Performance Pay Increases Dog Vaccinations to Reduce Human Rabies

Abstract

ABSTRACT Rural development projects often depend on local community members to coordinate community participation. Using a randomized controlled trial, this paper examines how pay-for-performance for community coordinators affects participation in dog vaccination events to prevent human rabies in Tanzania. Three treatments were implemented: fixed payment only, pay-for-performance only, or a mix of fixed payment and pay-for-performance. Using dog vaccination histories, the experiment equalizes the total expected payment across treatments, isolating the effect of payment type. Mixed payment increases dog vaccinations by 16 percent compared to fixed payment. Each 10 percent increase in per-dog payment raises vaccinations by 0.4 percent. Changing the fixed payment rate has a negligible effect. Thus, pay-for-performance induces higher effort than the fixed component. The findings suggest pay-for-performance can improve the effectiveness of rural development projects such as mass immunization events.