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Stalling COVID-19 vaccination rates threaten public health. To increase vaccination rates, governments across the globe are considering using monetary incentives. We present evidence on the effect of guaranteed payments on COVID-19 vaccination uptake. We ran a large pre-registered randomized controlled trial (N = 8,286) in Sweden and linked the data to population-wide administrative vaccination records. We found that modest monetary payments of $24 (SEK 200) increased vaccination rates by 4.2 percentage points (p = 0.005), from a baseline rate of 71.6%. In contrast, behavioral nudges increased stated intentions to vaccinate but had only small and not statistically significant impacts on vaccination rates. The results highlight the potential of modest monetary incentives to increase vaccination rates.

Although experimental studies have documented systematic decision errors, many leading scholars believe that experience, competition, and large stakes will reliably extinguish biases. We test for the presence of a fundamental bias, loss aversion, in a high-stakes context: professional golfers' performance on the PGA Tour. Golf provides a natural setting to test for loss aversion because golfers are rewarded for the total number of strokes they take during a tournament, yet each individual hole has a salient reference point, par. We analyze over 2.5 million putts using precise laser measurements and find evidence that even the best golfers-including Tiger Woods-show evidence of loss aversion.