The economics of vaccination

progetto PRIN 2017

 

Coordinatore Scientifico: Paolo Pin

 

Titolo: The economics of vaccination

 

Settore ERC: SH - Social Sciences and Humanities

 

Costo totale del progetto:  247.592 euro

 

Contributo MIUR per l’Università di Siena:  220.011 euro

 

Altri Partner del progetto:  Università degli Studi di TRIESTE

 

durata: 36 mesi

 

Breve descrizione della proposta:

A recent trend in many Western Countries is that more and more people avoid or delay vaccination against many common diseases. In Italy this phenomenon is particularly acute, imposing severe risk to the health system, as has been proven by the 2017 outbreaks of measles.

With this project, we will integrate one big dataset, whose collection is in progress since 2014, with additional data that we will obtain with randomized controlled experiments.

We will run those experiments with the help of a web portal providing information on vaccination, and with an ad-hoc smartphone app that will allow us to run standard behavioral experiments.

This will help us to understand what are the main reasons for under-vaccination, what are the behavioral biases that motivate them, and how they correlate with different segments of the population.

Developing theoretical models of social interaction and decision making about vaccination, we will be able to understand how the environment and/or the provision of information could be changed to improve attitudes toward vaccination schemes.

This will help the design of specifically oriented policy interventions aimed at increasing the vaccination levels, decreasing the risk of outbreaks of diseases.