@article{TEXTUAL,
      recid = {12717},
      author = {Milkman, Katherine L. and Ellis, Sean F. and Gromet, Dena  M. and Jung, Youngwoo and Luscher, Alex S. and Mobarak,  Rayyan S. and Paxson, Madeline K. and Silvera Zumaran,  Ramon A. and Kuan, Robert and Berman, Ron and Lewis, Neil  A.,  Jr. and List, John A. and Patel, Mitesh S. and Van den  Bulte, Christophe and Volpp, Kevin G. and Beauvais, Maryann  V. and Bellows, Jonathon K. and Marandola, Cheryl A. and  Duckworth, Angela L.},
      title = {Megastudy shows that reminders boost vaccination but  adding free rides does not},
      journal = {Nature},
      address = {2024-06-26},
      number = {TEXTUAL},
      abstract = {Encouraging routine COVID-19 vaccinations is likely to be  a crucial policy challenge for decades to come. To avert  hundreds of thousands of unnecessary hospitalizations and  deaths, adoption will need to be higher than it was in the  autumn of 2022 or 2023, when less than one-fifth of  Americans received booster vaccines. One approach to  encouraging vaccination is to eliminate the friction of  transportation hurdles. Previous research has shown that  friction can hinder follow-through and that individuals who  live farther from COVID-19 vaccination sites are less  likely to get vaccinated. However, the value of providing  free round-trip transportation to vaccination sites is  unknown. Here we show that offering people free round-trip  Lyft rides to pharmacies has no benefit over and above  sending them behaviourally informed text messages reminding  them to get vaccinated. We determined this by running a  megastudy with millions of CVS Pharmacy patients in the  United States testing the effects of (1) free round-trip  Lyft rides to CVS Pharmacies for vaccination appointments  and (2) seven different sets of behaviourally informed  vaccine reminder messages. Our results suggest that  offering previously vaccinated individuals free rides to  vaccination sites is not a good investment in the United  States, contrary to the high expectations of both expert  and lay forecasters. Instead, people in the United States  should be sent behaviourally informed COVID-19 vaccination  reminders, which increased the 30-day COVID-19 booster  uptake by 21% (1.05 percentage points) and spilled over to  increase 30-day influenza vaccinations by 8% (0.34  percentage points) in our megastudy. More rigorous testing  of interventions to promote vaccination is needed to ensure  that evidence-based solutions are deployed widely and that  ineffective but intuitively appealing tools are  discontinued.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/12717},
}