Do You Have COVID-19?: How to Increase the Use of Diagnostic and Contact-Tracing Apps

Abstract

Diagnostic and contact tracing apps are an important weapon against contagion during a pandemic. We study how the content of the messages used to promote the apps influences adoption by conducting a survey experiment on approximately 23,000 Mexican adults. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of three different prompts, or a control condition, before stating their willingness to adopt a diagnostic app and contact-tracing app. The prompt emphasizing government efforts to ensure data privacy, which has been one of the most common strategies, reduced willingness to adopt the diagnostic app by about 4 percentage points and the contact tracing app by 3 percentage points. An effective app promotion policy must understand individuals' reservations and be wary of unintended reactions to naive reassurances.

The Effect of a Crisis on Trust and Willingness to Reform: Evidence from Survey Panels in Argentina and Uruguay

“…In the Mexican case, depicted in Martinez-Villareal et al (2021), only 36% of their experimental survey sample thought that their neighbors keep social distance from others. We expect that people in our setting do not anticipate their peers to comply with COVID-19 containment strategies, either, given the socioeconomic and macroeconomic conditions of Uruguay and Argentina at the time of the COVID-19 arrival.…”

“…InMartinez-Villareal et al (2021) there is an important percentage of people who dismiss protocols and public policy…”