Visiting Speaker: Justin R. Sydnor, Wisconsin School of Business
Presentation Title: Preferences, Beliefs, and Follow-Through: Understanding the Demand for Flu Vaccines
Abstract: Vaccine take-up is lower than targets set by public health agencies. While contemporary accounts of vaccine hesitancy focus on misinformation and scientifically unwarranted beliefs, economic models of vaccination emphasize private individuals trading off perceived costs and benefits of vaccination. As little is known about how people perceive these costs and benefits, we conduct an online experiment to measure preferences for and beliefs about characteristics of the flu vaccine, and quantify biases in beliefs. We have two main findings. First, nearly all the difference in vaccination rates across vaccine intention groups are explained by differences in preferences over and beliefs about vaccine effectiveness and side effect. Second, beliefs are biased in a way that favors vaccination, except that vaccine hesitant respondents overestimate the side effect consequences of vaccination. These results imply that scientifically unwarranted beliefs play a quantitatively minor role in flu vaccine hesitancy, efforts to correct beliefs will require addressing perceived side effects, and interventions such as subsidy may be justified by externalities more than internalities.
Host: Ethan Lieber