On April 4th, with Daniel Kaluuya hosting, SNL performed a sketch called “Will you take it?”, where as the host, his role was to convince his family members to take the vaccine. Toward the end of the bit, this devolves to offering increasingly large cash prizes: $5k, then $20k. Unfortunately, as we’ll see below, this is not as outlandish as it seems.
As part of the monthly survey that we do for Trendlines (which, by the way, you should subscribe to -- check out some of our previous editions), we included a module especially for our compatriots (we only sample in the US for this survey) that are “vaccine hesitant”, or resistant to taking one of the vaccines approved for use in the US. Thankfully, the share of the population that falls into this camp is falling, but there is still a population of about 20% of adults that either will “definitely not” take a vaccine, or do so “only if required”.
If you answered that way to our survey, you would be presented with a module that looks like this:
As I mentioned in this post, if you simply asked people what their threshold price is for taking the vaccine, you would likely have a hard time getting good answers. But most people are capable of saying yes or no to a deal. (And yes, we know this is not as good as if you actually offered these amounts to people, but as an approximation, it’s much, much better).
Over several different screens, these respondents will see different combinations of vaccine type and cash offer. Their choices, along with the variation in the hypothetical deals presented to them, allow us to estimate what their threshold prices are.
We showed the three vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J) at offers ranging from $10 to $500. Of the 967 people that took the survey, 317 qualified for the experiment. Of the 317 people that went through the experiment, a whopping 211, or 67%, said “no” to taking the vaccine no matter what price we offered. Apparently $500 was not a high enough ceiling on our offers. In future revisions we’ll have to increase that number, but from this dataset, we can estimate that about ⅔ of vaccine hesitant people require compensation above $500 in order to take the vaccine.
Of the remainder, 5 people said “yes” no matter what price we offered. That left 101 people in our dataset to analyze; each person saw 12 screens with choices, so this is a dataset of 1,212 choices to analyze.
With a simple logistic regression, we can estimate the average threshold prices for each of the vaccines:
J&J: $581
Pfizer: $337
Moderna: $327
Of note here is the colossal $244 price difference between Pfizer and J&J. We can’t tell how much of this difference is due to its lower reported efficacy, it being the third player on the scene, or the pause placed on its rollout; regardless, it’s a large gap indicating the severity of the confidence gap between J&J and Pfizer and Moderna.
With a more complex model, we can attempt to estimate the individual-level willingness-to-pay, which would be useful if policymakers throw up their hands and start to offer cash payments; you’d want to know how many people you could convince at a given price level. With a small sample size and a too-narrow range of prices offered, this should be treated with a grain of salt, but you can see the very different ranges, and high payments required overall, when looking at how much even persuadable people will require to be persuaded to take the vaccine.
Not great.