Prosocial motivation for vaccination

Jonathan Reddinger, Gary Charness and David Levine

No emj6v, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Vaccination has both private and public benefits. We ask whether social preferences—concerns for the well-being of other people—influence one's decision regarding vaccination. We measure these social preferences for 549 online subjects: We give each subject \$4 to play a public-good game and make contributions to public welfare. To the extent that one gets vaccinated out of concern for the health of others, contribution in this game is analogous to an individual's decision to obtain vaccination. We collect COVID-19 vaccination history separately to avoid experimenter-demand effects. We find a strong result: Contribution in the public-good game is associated with greater demand to voluntarily receive a first dose, and thus also to vaccinate earlier. Compared to a subject who contributes nothing, one who contributes the maximum (\$4) is 48% more likely to obtain a first dose voluntarily in the four-month period that we study (April through August 2021). People who are more pro-social are indeed more likely to take a voluntary COVID-19 vaccination.

Date: 2022-04-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-hea and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/6260984a05b85a0ac465f0bb/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:emj6v

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/emj6v

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().