A citywide experiment testing the impact of geographically targeted, high-pay-off vaccine lotteries

Katherine Milkman, Linnea Gandhi, Sean F. Ellis, Heather N. Graci, Dena M. Gromet, Rayyan S. Mobarak, Alison M. Buttenheim, Angela L. Duckworth, Devin Pope, Ala Stanford, Richard Thaler and Kevin G. Volpp
Additional contact information
Linnea Gandhi: University of Pennsylvania
Sean F. Ellis: University of Pennsylvania
Heather N. Graci: University of Pennsylvania
Dena M. Gromet: University of Pennsylvania
Rayyan S. Mobarak: University of Pennsylvania
Alison M. Buttenheim: University of Pennsylvania
Angela L. Duckworth: University of Pennsylvania
Devin Pope: University of Chicago
Ala Stanford: US Department of Health and Human Services
Kevin G. Volpp: University of Pennsylvania

Nature Human Behaviour, 2022, vol. 6, issue 11, 1515-1524

Abstract: Abstract Lotteries have been shown to motivate behaviour change in many settings, but their value as a policy tool is relatively untested. We implemented a pre-registered, citywide experiment to test the effects of three high-pay-off, geographically targeted lotteries designed to motivate adult Philadelphians to get their COVID-19 vaccine. In each drawing, the residents of a randomly selected ‘treatment’ zip code received half the lottery prizes, boosting their chances of winning to 50×–100× those of other Philadelphians. The first treated zip code, which drew considerable media attention, may have experienced a small bump in vaccinations compared with the control zip codes: average weekly vaccinations rose by an estimated 61 per 100,000 people per week (+11%). After pooling the results from all three zip codes treated during our six-week experiment, however, we do not detect evidence of any overall benefits. Furthermore, our 95% confidence interval provides a 9% upper bound on the net benefits of treatment in our study.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01437-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:nat:nathum:v:6:y:2022:i:11:d:10.1038_s41562-022-01437-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01437-0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().