Vaccination Incentives
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SeriesHealth Economics Seminars
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Speaker(s)Armando Meier (University of Lausanne, Switzerland)
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FieldEmpirical Microeconomics
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LocationErasmus University Rotterdam, Van der Goot Building, room M1-07
Rotterdam -
Date and time
April 13, 2023
12:00 - 13:00
Abstract
Vaccination incentives are an important policy option to internalize externalities but are rarely used because we don’t know which incentives work for whom. With a large-scale field experiment, we study four incentives for COVID-19 booster doses. Incentives boost uptake in the short and long-run: A guaranteed incentive increases uptake by 36%, more so than a lottery ticket (24%), a donation to a charitable organization (12%), and even people choosing their own incentive (33%). While the vaccine hesitant react less to incentives and the prosocial react more to the prosocial incentive, machine learning indicates that the guaranteed incentive for all is the dominant policy option.