Many argue that there are huge monetary and psychological costs to learning HIV status. I find that these barriers can be easily overcome. After being tested for HIV, individuals in rural
Malawi were randomly assigned monetary incentives to return for their results. Without any monetary incentives demand for HIV was moderate: 39 percent of those tested returned to learn
their HIV results. However, randomly assigned monetary rewards had large and significant effects on learning HIV results and increased overall attendance to counseling centers by over
100 percent. Distance to randomly-placed counseling centers had a negative impact on returning for results where living under a kilometer from the center increased attendance by 8 percent.
These results have strong policy implications for designing interventions to increase testing, especially as antiretroviral therapies become more available.