Overcoming the Cost of Vaccination: Why Low Take-up and How to Improve It? Experiment in Northeastern Nigeria

Ryoko Sato, University of Michigan

This paper examines whether the vaccination take-up is constrained by emotional cost and if it can be overcome by emotional message or cash incentive in rural Nigeria. In order to identify if women face emotional cost of vaccination, I first randomize the conditionality under which respondents can receive a cash transfer. Each respondent was randomly assigned a cash transfer conditioned either upon attendance at health clinic (“Just Show-up”) or upon receiving the vaccination at the health clinic (“Vaccination”). Second, I randomize the information provision to study whether emotional information enhances the vaccination behavior. I found that respondents were slightly less likely to receive the vaccination at the clinic under “Just Show-up” conditionality. Small cash incentives have strong positive effect on vaccination take-up but fearful information of disease did not improve the vaccination behavior among average women. It rather reduced the take-up among women who never received the tetanus vaccination before.