University of Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland.
CESifo, Munich, Germany.
Nature. 2023 Jan;613(7944):526-533. doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-05512-4. Epub 2023 Jan 11.
Financial incentives to encourage healthy and prosocial behaviours often trigger initial behavioural change, but a large academic literature warns against using them. 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 generally. 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.
经济激励措施鼓励健康和亲社会行为，通常会引发初始的行为改变，但大量学术文献警告不要使用这些措施。批评者警告说，经济激励措施可能会挤出亲社会动机，并降低感知安全性和信任感，从而在没有支付报酬时减少健康行为，并更普遍地侵蚀道德。在这里，我们报告了一项在瑞典进行的大规模、预先注册的研究结果，该研究从因果关系上衡量了为接种第一剂 COVID-19 疫苗提供经济激励的意外后果。我们使用了随机接触经济激励、全民行政疫苗接种记录和丰富的调查数据的独特组合。我们没有发现经济激励措施的负面后果；我们甚至可以拒绝提供经济激励措施对未来疫苗接种率、道德、信任和感知安全性产生任何微小负面影响的可能性。在一项补充研究中，我们发现，告知美国居民州激励计划的存在也没有负面后果。我们的研究结果不仅为关于改变行为的经济激励措施的学术辩论提供了信息，也为考虑使用经济激励措施来改变行为的政策制定者提供了信息。
