Justin R. Sydnor, PhD│CHIBE Research Seminar

Speaker(s)

• Justin R. Sydnor, PhD — American Family Insurance Distinguished Chair in Risk Management and Insurance; Department Chair, Department of Risk and Insurance, Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Event Description

Topic: “Preferences, Beliefs and the Demand for Vaccinations.”

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Seasonal infectious diseases such as influenza, COVID-19, RSV, and pneumonia kill thousands of Americans every year. Safe, effective vaccines for these diseases exist and are widely available at low or no cost to patients. Yet vaccination rates are low, ranging from 25 to 50 percent depending on the disease and season. What explains the low take-up of vaccines? Possible explanations include subjective beliefs about low disease risk or low vaccine efficacy, preferences against vaccination due to concerns about side effects, fear of needles and the like, and behavioral frictions that lead to failures to follow through on intentions to vaccinate. We explore these issues for the seasonal flu vaccine in a survey that collects information about beliefs and willingness to vaccinate and combine that survey evidence with randomized variation in incentives to vaccinate for the flu. We identify different subgroups of the population, including those who have already vaccinated, those who intend to vaccinate, those who would consider vaccinating and those who do not intend to vaccinate. We find that beliefs about the overall prevalence of the flu and the scientific estimates of the effectiveness of the vaccine differ very little across groups. However, we find that those who do not intend to vaccinate believe that they personally are much less likely than average to catch the flu. All groups care significantly about the efficacy of the vaccine and would be more likely to vaccinate if the vaccine were more effective, but there are stronger preferences among those who do not intend to vaccinate that would lead to only modest vaccination rates even if vaccines were extremely effective. We find that incentives of around $10 to $20 increase vaccinate rates by around 5 percentage points among the non-vaccinated in November/December.  The effect is larger for and concentrated among those who had intentions to vaccinate at baseline. A “nudge-style” treatment that encouraged planning and gave links to pharmacies to create a vaccine appointment had a significant positive impact on vaccination, but again only among those with prior intentions of vaccinating. Taken together the results suggest that: a) simple misinformation about flu prevalence and vaccine effectiveness are not an important driver of low vaccination rates, b) subjective beliefs about low risk for flu and strong preferences against vaccination both help to explain low vaccination rates, c) many have strong preferences against vaccination and even at very large incentive sizes significant shares would not vaccinate, and d) there is clear evidence that a subset of the population fails to follow through on vaccination intentions and can benefit from incentives and nudge treatments. 

Justin Sydnor, PhD, is the American Family Insurance Distinguished Chair in Risk Management and Insurance at the Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin – Madison. Justin earned his PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley with a specialization in behavioral economics. His research interests span a number of areas of applied microeconomics, including consumer decision making in insurance markets, the impact of self-control problems and mechanisms for addressing those problems related to health behaviors and household finances, limited attention and discrimination. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Economics of Health Program and has served as a senior editor for the Journal of Risk and Insurance and on the editorial board of the American Economic Review. He is a member of the External Advisory Committee for the Penn Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics

Organizer(s)