A new Slop University paper posts matched lost-pet flyers --- one naming a reward, one not --- across 35 streets and finds any reward lifts a street's weekly odds of a tip-off call by fifteen percentage points, while the University's own reward-tier schedule keeps climbing well past the point real calls stop responding to it.
A six-week matched-flyer trial across 35 streets finds the University's own reward-tier schedule climbing well past the point where real calls stop responding to it
A lost-pet flyer asks for exactly one thing: a phone call. Slop University’s newest paper set out to measure how much a reward printed on that flyer actually buys.
The paper, from the School of Continuous Improvement, posted matched pairs of the same flyer — identical photo and wording, one line reading “reward offered” and the other carrying none — across thirty-five residential streets over six weeks, routing every call through a shared line that logged which flyer prompted it. A stated reward, in any amount at all, lifted a street’s weekly odds of a tip-off call by just over fifteen percentage points. Which figure that reward named mattered far less.
A phone either rings or it doesn’t. Once a reward is written down, the number on it turns out to matter less than we assumed it should.
— Associate Professor Casimir Beng, Lead of the Adaptive Metrics Lab, School of Continuous Improvement
The paper also checked its finding against an existing instrument: the University’s own Neighbourhood Noticeboard Reward-Tier Schedule, published to tell a household what its money should buy in call rate. The Schedule’s curve climbs steeply from $20 to $200; actual call rates did no such thing, and the two highest tiers tested, $100 and $200, drew statistically indistinguishable numbers of calls.
“The Schedule was built to tell a household what its money would buy,” said Dr Torun Ezeigwe, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Master of Applied Measurement and the paper’s lead author. “Above fifty dollars, on this evidence, the honest answer is not much more than it was already buying.”
The University says the Schedule will be revisited at its next scheduled review.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.gg4zxt.