The Effect of Perceived Risks on the Demand for Vaccination: Results from a Discrete Choice Experiment
Open Access
- 8 February 2013
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Public Library of Science (PLoS) in PLOS ONE
- Vol. 8 (2), e54149
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0054149
Abstract
The demand for vaccination against infectious diseases involves a choice between vaccinating and not vaccinating, in which there is a trade-off between the benefits and costs of each option. The aim of this paper is to investigate these trade-offs and to estimate how the perceived prevalence and severity of both the disease against which the vaccine is given and any vaccine associated adverse events (VAAE) might affect demand. A Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) was used to elicit stated preferences from a representative sample of 369 UK mothers of children below 5 years of age, for three hypothetical vaccines. Cost was included as an attribute, which enabled estimation of the willingness to pay for different vaccines having differing levels of the probability of occurrence and severity of both the infection and VAAE. The results suggest that the severity of the health effects associated with both the diseases and VAAEs exert an important influence on the demand for vaccination, whereas the probability of these events occurring was not a significant predictor. This has important implications for public health policy, which has tended to focus on the probability of these health effects as the main influence on decision making. Our results also suggest that anticipated regrets about the consequences of making the wrong decision also exert an influence on demand.Keywords
This publication has 34 references indexed in Scilit:
- Anatomy of a health scare: Education, income and the MMR controversy in the UKJournal of Health Economics, 2011
- Does the Inclusion of a Cost Attribute Result in Different Preferences for the Surgical Treatment of Primary Basal Cell Carcinoma?PharmacoEconomics, 2010
- Can Influenza Epidemics Be Prevented by Voluntary Vaccination?PLoS Computational Biology, 2007
- Determinants of Dutch parents’ decisions to vaccinate their childVaccine, 2006
- Deriving welfare measures from discrete choice experiments: inconsistency between current methods and random utility and welfare theoryHealth Economics, 2004
- Validation of a Decision Regret ScaleMedical Decision Making, 2003
- Omission bias in vaccination decisions: Where’s the “omission”? Where’s the “bias”?Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2003
- Using stated preference discrete choice modelling to evaluate the introduction of varicella vaccinationHealth Economics, 2002
- Use of discrete choice experiments to elicit preferencesQuality and Safety in Health Care, 2001
- THE USE OF CONJOINT ANALYSIS TO ELICIT WILLINGNESS-TO-PAY VALUESInternational Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care, 2000