Hi, y’all. As a graduate student, I am really excited to run a study in Prolific. I noticed that Prolific has a discount for academia. However, I didn’t get this discount for some reason though I have registered with my work email (school email with .edu). I am not sure whether I missed something or not. Does anyone know how to solve this? I really appreciate it! Have a good day!
Hi Yating_Yang, it turns out that the 25% is off of the “total spend” (in Prolific’s language). So if your (own) calculated total payment to all subjects is X, you would actually multiply that amount by 1.3333 (that is, 100% + 33.33%) to get the actual final amount of (1.33)(X). For example, suppose that the “study rewards” you have to pay is $900, then the total cost will be: 900 * 1.3333 = $1,200. In this way, the “service fee” that Prolific calculates is 1200 - 900 = $300, which is exactly 25% of the total $1,200. I hope this clears things up.
Honestly, this is the first time in my life I have seen the fee calculated this way for a service. It took me some time (and some back-and-forth correspondence with Prolific support) to figure it out, as I thought this was a very sleazy business practice. So thank you for raising the question, making me realize that I was not alone in this. Just curious how many fellow researchers out there get confused by Prolific’s “25%” advertisement like you and I did.
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Also, not related to your question, but I urge you and future researchers who come across this post to be wary of international transaction fees if you are not based in the UK. I am based in the US, and I am charged an annoying additional fee of 3% by my bank for each transaction with Prolific (I never noticed this fee until I looked at my bank statement by accident). I am not blaming Prolific, since this is beyond their control and related to banks’ operations. But it would be nice if they disclosed this from the get-go. Really frustrating experiences I must say!
Thank you! The whole system is not so easy to understand…