Abstract
Vaccine hesitancy is a significant barrier to reaching herd immunity and exiting the Covid-19 pandemic. This study examines the potential effectiveness of monetary incentives in conjunction with informational treatments about vaccine efficacy, lack of side effects, and zero costs. We elicit monetary valuations (both positive and negative) for the coronavirus vaccine by conducting an online randomized experiment on a representative sample of 2461 individuals across the US. The study elicits vaccination uptake, then participants’ valuations (willingness to pay (WTP) or the willingness to accept (WTA)) for the vaccine based upon the stated choice of participants to accept or reject the vaccine. We find that a $1000 incentive increases vaccination uptake up to 86.9%. We identify two distinct segments among the vaccine hesitants—“Reluctants” and “Unwillings”. Reluctants can be persuaded to vaccinate for some level of monetary incentive, whereas Unwillings indicate that no amount of monetary incentive will persuade them to vaccinate. The Unwillings are more likely to (a) think that the disease is insufficiently severe, (b) have less faith in the public health system, (c) be older, compared to the Reluctants.
Highlights
Vaccine hesitancy is a significant barrier to reaching herd immunity and exiting the Covid-19 pandemic
Epidemiologists’ best assessments are that a herd immunity threshold (HIT) of 75 to 90% of the population needs to be vaccinated for Covid-19 (Anderson et al, 2020); there is a significant gap between the current uptake and the threshold needed due to vaccine hesitancy (Lazarus et al, 2020)
Using our willingness to accept the coronavirus vaccine (WTA) elicitation, we show that monetary incentives can significantly increase vaccine uptake
Summary
Vaccine hesitancy is a significant barrier to reaching herd immunity and exiting the Covid-19 pandemic. Epidemiologists’ best assessments are that a herd immunity threshold (HIT) of 75 to 90% of the population needs to be vaccinated for Covid-19 (Anderson et al, 2020); there is a significant gap between the current uptake and the threshold needed due to vaccine hesitancy (Lazarus et al, 2020). Even among front-line workers who are most at risk of catching the virus, significant vaccine hesitancy is observed (Shalby, 2020) This gap is cause for concern for numerous reasons: (i) new variants of the virus, which may be more infectious and deadly, circulate amongst people that are unvaccinated, prolonging the pandemic (Davies et al, 2021), (ii) due to heterogeneity in vaccination rates across geographic regions, the average uptake needs to be substantially higher than the HIT. With a $500 incentive, vaccine uptake can be increased by between 11.5
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