Optimal scheduling of contact attempts in mixed-mode surveys

Survey nonresponse occurs when members of a sample cannot or will not participate in the survey. It remains a problem despite the development of statistical methods that aim to reduce nonresponse. In this paper, we address the problem of resource allocation in survey designs in which the focus is on the quality of the survey results given that there will be nonresponse. We propose a novel method in which the optimal allocationof survey resources can be determined. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by extensive numerical experiments.