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OHIO. – An innovative lottery programme in Ohio looks like it might have succeeded in raising vaccination rates. If the result holds, it means a triumph for behavioural economics — and that will open up the possibility of using lotteries to lure people into doing all sorts of things.
Less than 50 percentof the US population has been vaccinated so far — enough to reduce cases, but not nearly enough to end the pandemic decisively. Public health authorities have tossed out a lot of ideas for getting these people to do the right thing: vaccine passports, payments to people who get vaccinated, sending people personalised text messages, to name a few.
But the best solution might have been found by Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine. He recently announced a US$1 million prize lottery that people can enter by showing they’ve been vaccinated. Two days after the programme was announced, the state had its best vaccination day in weeks. The effect might be temporary, but it establishes a useful precedent: a lottery is a good lure.
Just a small chance to win a million bucks might get vaccine refusers to drop the partisan nonsense.
A normal lottery ticket costs money; for public policy lotteries, the only price of admission would be doing something that helps you anyway.
A lottery might be much more effective than simple cash payments. First of all, entering a lottery is fun — it lets you dream big dreams about what you’d do with the prize money, even if your chance of winning is infinitesimal. But also, behavioural economists have documented a phenomenon called probability weighting — human beings can’t easily comprehend very low probabilities, so they tend to think the chances of rare events are higher than they really are. Everyone knows they’re unlikely to win the lottery, but since they don’t realise just how astronomically unlikely, the lottery seems a better bet than it really is. – Bloomberg
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