Incentives, Surrogates, and Long-run Vaccination

Pol Campos Mercade, Armando N. Meier, Stephan Meier, Devin G. Pope, Florian H. Schneider and Erik Wengstroem
Additional contact information
Pol Campos Mercade: Department of Economics, Lund University
Armando N. Meier: Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Basel
Stephan Meier: Columbia Business School, Columbia University
Devin G. Pope: Booth School of Business, University of Chicago
Florian H. Schneider: Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen
Erik Wengstroem: Department of Economics, Lund University

No 26-13, CEBI working paper series from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. The Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI)

Abstract: Can monetary incentives improve health behaviors in the long run, and do commonly used surrogate outcomes capture these effects? We study these questions in the context of vaccination using a large-scale eld experiment. The experiment combines commonly used surrogates|vaccination intentions, intermediate behavioral proxies, and short-run vaccination|with long-run administrative vaccination records. We first document that incentives increase vaccination rates in the long run: guaranteed $20 incentives raise COVID-19 booster uptake by 9 percentage points. Lottery-based incentives also increase long-run uptake, while prosocial incentives primarily accelerate vaccination. Second, using surrogacy methods, we study whether surrogates can predict long-run impacts. Although the surrogates are strongly correlated with eventual vaccination, the assumptions required for surrogacy methods are often violated, and they do not accurately predict long-run impacts. Our ndings highlight both the ability of incentives to change behavior and the importance of measuring long-run outcomes rather than relying solely on surrogates.

Keywords: incentives; health behavior; vaccination; surrogates (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D01 D62 I12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 67
Date: 2026-06-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-nud
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