Financial incentives for vaccination do not have negative unintended consequences

Funding Information: We are very grateful for the support of the Public Health Agency of Sweden regarding the linkage of the trial data with administrative vaccination records. We thank M. Alsan, S. Ambühl, B. Bartling, S. Bowles, A. Buttenheim, E. Fehr, U. Gneezy, J. Haushofer, D. Huffman, N. Lacetera, E. Largent, G. Loewenstein, M. Macis, M. Maréchal, R. Perez-Truglia, P. Rey-Biel, J. Savulescu, A. Stutzer, K. Volpp and R. Weber for feedback. We acknowledge funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation grant no. 100018_185176 (F.H.S.), CEBI coming from the Danish National Research Foundation grant no. DNRF134 (P.C.-M.), the Chazen Institute for Global Business at Columbia Business School (S.M.), the Columbia Business School (S.M.), the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago (D.P.), the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (E.W.) and the Swiss National Science Foundation grant no. PZ00P1_201956 (A.N.M.). Publisher Copyright: © 2023, The Author(s).Financial incentives to encourage healthy and prosocial behaviours often trigger initial behavioural change1–11, but a large academic literature warns against using them12–16. Critics warn that financial incentives can crowd out prosocial motivations and reduce perceived safety and trust, thereby reducing healthy behaviours when no payments are offered and eroding morals more generally17–24. Here we report findings from a large-scale, pre-registered study in Sweden that causally measures the unintended consequences of offering financial incentives for taking the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. We use a unique combination of random exposure to financial incentives, population-wide administrative vaccination records and rich survey data. We find no negative consequences of financial incentives; we can reject even small negative impacts of offering financial incentives on future vaccination uptake, morals, trust and perceived safety. In a complementary study, we find that informing US residents about the existence of state incentive programmes also has no negative consequences. Our findings inform not only the academic debate on financial incentives for behaviour change but also policy-makers who consider using financial incentives to change behaviour.Peer reviewe