Past event
Department of Economics Seminar with Professor Erik Wengström, Lund University Incentives to Vaccinate
Professor Wengström is a Professor of Economics at Lund University and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Hanken School of Economics. His research focuses on how people behave in economic, financial, and health contexts. He serves as an editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Economics. He is also a member of the RISLab team, a research fellow at the Vienna Center for Experimental Economics, and a fellow at the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell University.
Abstract: We study the effects of different incentives on vaccination uptake in a large-scale randomized controlled trial in Sweden (N = 5, 319). We use population-wide administrative vaccination data to analyze how different types of incentives affect the uptake of COVID-19 booster doses. We find that incentives boost uptake in the short and long run: A guaranteed incentive increases uptake by more than 12 percentage points (pp), more so than a lottery ticket (8pp), a donation to a charitable organization (4pp), or people choosing one of these incentives on their own (11pp). The guaranteed, lottery, and choice incentives lead to a sustained increase in vaccination uptake after 12 months of around 7pp. While the vaccine-hesitant react less to incentives, guaranteed and lottery incentives are still effective for the hesitant. The results show that guaranteed incentives are highly effective in increasing vaccination uptake against widespread infectious diseases.