Abstract
The stalling of COVID-19 vaccination rates threatens public health. To increase vaccination rates, governments across the world are considering the use of monetary incentives. Here we present evidence about the effect of guaranteed payments on COVID-19 vaccination uptake. We ran a large preregistered randomized controlled trial (with 8286 participants) in Sweden and linked the data to population-wide administrative vaccination records. We found that modest monetary payments of 24 US dollars (200 Swedish kronor) increased vaccination rates by 4.2 percentage points (P = 0.005), from a baseline rate of 71.6%. By contrast, behavioral nudges increased stated intentions to become vaccinated but had only small and not statistically significant impacts on vaccination rates. The results highlight the potential of modest monetary incentives to raise vaccination rates.
Highlights
Our findings are important because it is controversial whether monetary incentives to encourage healthier behavior in general and for COVID-19 vaccination lead to the desired result
We studied the effect of three behavioral nudges on vaccination uptake
All reported results in the text and figures come from ordinary least squares regressions (OLS) with heteroscedasticity-robust standard errors
Summary
Our findings are important because it is controversial whether monetary incentives to encourage healthier behavior in general and for COVID-19 vaccination lead to the desired result. We report findings from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) studying the impact of guaranteed monetary incentives on COVID-19 vaccination. We find that the monetary incentives increased vaccination rates by 4.2 percentage points.
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