Cash versus Lotteries: COVID-19 Vaccine Incentives Experiment*

  1. Raymond M. Duch
  2. Adrian Barnett
  3. Maciej Filipek
  4. Laurence Roope
  5. Mara Violato
  6. Philip Clarke

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Abstract

Governments are considering financial incentives to increase vaccine uptake to end the COVID-19 pandemic. Incentives being offered include cash-equivalents such as vouchers or being entered into lotteries. Our experiment involved random assignment of 1,628 unvaccinated participants in the United States to one of three 45 second informational videos promoting vaccination with messages about: (a) health benefits of COVID-19 vaccines (control); (b) being entered into lotteries; or (c) receiving cash equivalent vouchers. After seeing the control health information video, 16% of individuals wanted information on where to get vaccinated. This compared with 14% of those assigned to the lottery video (odds ratio of 0.82 relative to control: 95% credible interval 0.57-1.17) and 22% of those assigned to the cash voucher video (odds ratio of 1.53 relative to control: 95% credible interval 1.11-2.11). These results support greater use of cash vouchers to promote COVID-19 vaccine uptake and do not support the use of lottery incentives.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.07.26.21250865: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    The Bayesian model was fitted in JAGS version 4.3.0 [37].
    JAGS
    suggested: (rjags, RRID:SCR_017573)

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    A potential limitation of our study – as with most vaccine uptake studies – is that we do not observe the participants’ vaccine decisions. Our outcome measure is their decision to seek out additional vaccination information. An extension of our design that linked information treatments to actual vaccination decisions would be a more powerful design. The experimental results reported in this article provide some guidance for incentive policies. First, we provide evidence that COVID-19 vaccination messaging that highlights financial incentives will likely have a bigger motivational impact on the non-vaccinated than is the case for standard COVID-19 messaging that focuses solely on the health benefits. Second, the non-vaccinated are significantly more likely to be motivated by messaging that highlights cash voucher incentives than they are by lottery incentives. In fact, lottery messaging is no more effective than standard CDC health messaging.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

    About SciScore

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.07.26.21250865v1 on medRxiv