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Incentives to vaccinate

Campos-Mercade, Pol LU ; Meier, Armando ; Meier, Stephan ; Pope, Devin ; Schneider, Florian H and Wengström, Erik LU (2024) In NBER Working Papers
Abstract
Whether monetary incentives to change behavior work and how they should be structured are fundamental economic questions. We overcome typical data limitations in a large-scale field experiment on vaccination (N = 5,324) with a unique combination of administrative and survey data. We find that guaranteed incentives of $20 increase uptake by 13 percentage points in the short run and 9 in the long run. Guaranteed incentives are more effective than lottery-based, prosocial, or individually-targeted incentives, though all boost vaccinations. There are no unintended consequences on future vaccination or heterogeneities based on vaccination attitudes and incentivized economic preferences. Further, administrative data on relatives shows... (More)
Whether monetary incentives to change behavior work and how they should be structured are fundamental economic questions. We overcome typical data limitations in a large-scale field experiment on vaccination (N = 5,324) with a unique combination of administrative and survey data. We find that guaranteed incentives of $20 increase uptake by 13 percentage points in the short run and 9 in the long run. Guaranteed incentives are more effective than lottery-based, prosocial, or individually-targeted incentives, though all boost vaccinations. There are no unintended consequences on future vaccination or heterogeneities based on vaccination attitudes and incentivized economic preferences. Further, administrative data on relatives shows substantial positive spillovers. Our findings demonstrate the great potential of incentives for improving public health and provide guidance on their design. (Less)
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author
; ; ; ; and
organization
publishing date
type
Working paper/Preprint
publication status
published
subject
in
NBER Working Papers
issue
32899
publisher
National Bureau of Economic Research
DOI
10.3386/w32899
language
English
LU publication?
yes
id
7ccd3c2b-7322-4cf2-818b-a40a9abacf48
date added to LUP
2025-03-24 10:13:35
date last changed
2025-04-04 14:44:09
@misc{7ccd3c2b-7322-4cf2-818b-a40a9abacf48,
  abstract     = {{Whether monetary incentives to change behavior work and how they should be structured are fundamental economic questions. We overcome typical data limitations in a large-scale field experiment on vaccination (N = 5,324) with a unique combination of administrative and survey data. We find that guaranteed incentives of $20 increase uptake by 13 percentage points in the short run and 9 in the long run. Guaranteed incentives are more effective than lottery-based, prosocial, or individually-targeted incentives, though all boost vaccinations. There are no unintended consequences on future vaccination or heterogeneities based on vaccination attitudes and incentivized economic preferences. Further, administrative data on relatives shows substantial positive spillovers. Our findings demonstrate the great potential of incentives for improving public health and provide guidance on their design.}},
  author       = {{Campos-Mercade, Pol and Meier, Armando and Meier, Stephan and Pope, Devin and Schneider, Florian H and Wengström, Erik}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Working Paper}},
  number       = {{32899}},
  publisher    = {{National Bureau of Economic Research}},
  series       = {{NBER Working Papers}},
  title        = {{Incentives to vaccinate}},
  url          = {{http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w32899}},
  doi          = {{10.3386/w32899}},
  year         = {{2024}},
}