Completed Projects - Innovation

Immunization is a vital and cost-effective public health intervention for disease prevention and societal resilience. Despite extensive information campaigns promoting vaccine accessibility, vaccine hesitancy remains a challenge. Recent events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, revealed that hesitancy is not solely due to a lack of information but is influenced by heuristics, distrust of authorities, and fear of side effects. Misinformation on social media and digital echo chambers exacerbates the problem. It is often difficult to disentangle these factors preventing vaccinations from the idiosyncratic perceived risks that individuals face from infection.

This discussion underscores a second important aspect of vaccination behavior: vaccination is not only a personal choice but also a prosocial action that affects the health and well-being of others. Prosocial behavior can also induce vaccination among individuals who would not otherwise do so if they are properly informed about the risk others face if they become infected. Prosocial behavior can be influenced by the family, community, and gender, among many other determinants. In this context, the digital environment can reinforce all these behaviors.

This research project has three main objectives: (i) to understand the role of prosociality in vaccine hesitancy, net of individual benefits; (ii) to assess determinants of gender bias in prosocial behavior; (iii) to understand how digital media usage affects vaccine uptake conditional on altruistic tendencies.

To achieve these goals, we utilize a natural experiment involving the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination in Italy. For males, vaccination against HPV is almost exclusively a prosocial decision because serious health consequences of HPV infection in men are quite rare. Hence, vaccination behavior can now be studied net of negligible perceived risk of illness. This project aims to address the research questions above by producing novel survey data on male HPV vaccination, combining quasi-experimental approaches with information experiments.