IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/20432.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Vaccine Approvals and Mandates Under Uncertainty: Some Simple Analytics

Author

Listed:
  • Charles F. Manski

Abstract

Social interactions make communicable disease a core concern of public health policy. A prevalent problem is scarcity of empirical evidence that are informative about how interventions affect population behavior and illness. Randomized trials, which have been important to evaluation of treatments for non-infectious diseases, are less informative about treatment of communicable diseases because they do not shed light on population-wide disease transmission. In particular, trials do not reveal the indirect preventive (herd immunity) effect of vaccination on persons who are not vaccinated or who are unsuccessfully vaccinated. This paper studies the decision problems faced by health planners who must choose whether to approve a new vaccine or mandate an approved one, but who do not know the indirect effect of vaccination. I study vaccine approval as a choice between a zero vaccination rate (rejection of the new vaccine) and whatever vaccination rate the health-care system will yield if the vaccine is approved. I study the decision to mandate an approved vaccine as a choice between vaccinating the entire population (the mandate) and the vaccination rate that would be generated by decentralized health-care decisions. Considering decision making with partial knowledge, I show that it may be possible to determine optimal policies in some cases where the planner can only bound the indirect effect of vaccination. Considering settings where optimal policy is indeterminate, I pose several criteria for decision making--expected utility, minimax, and minimax-regret--and derive the policies they yield.

Suggested Citation

  • Charles F. Manski, 2014. "Vaccine Approvals and Mandates Under Uncertainty: Some Simple Analytics," NBER Working Papers 20432, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20432
    Note: EH PE AG
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w20432.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Charles F. Manski, 1997. "Monotone Treatment Response," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 65(6), pages 1311-1334, November.
    2. Charles F. Manski, 2013. "Identification of treatment response with social interactions," Econometrics Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 16(1), pages 1-23, February.
    3. Charles F. Manski, 2011. "Choosing Treatment Policies Under Ambiguity," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 3(1), pages 25-49, September.
    4. Hudgens, Michael G. & Halloran, M. Elizabeth, 2008. "Toward Causal Inference With Interference," Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistical Association, vol. 103, pages 832-842, June.
    5. Charles F. Manski, 2009. "The 2009 Lawrence R. Klein Lecture: Diversified Treatment Under Ambiguity," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 50(4), pages 1013-1041, November.
    6. Boulier Bryan L. & Datta Tejwant S. & Goldfarb Robert S, 2007. "Vaccination Externalities," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 7(1), pages 1-27, May.
    7. Brito, Dagobert L. & Sheshinski, Eytan & Intriligator, Michael D., 1991. "Externalities and compulsary vaccinations," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 45(1), pages 69-90, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Manski, Charles F., 2013. "Public Policy in an Uncertain World: Analysis and Decisions," Economics Books, Harvard University Press, number 9780674066892, Spring.
    2. Charles F. Manski, 2021. "Vaccination Planning under Uncertainty, with Application to Covid-19," NBER Working Papers 28446, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Andrea Galeotti & Brian W. Rogers, 2013. "Strategic Immunization and Group Structure," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, American Economic Association, vol. 5(2), pages 1-32, May.
    4. Goodkin-Gold, Matthew & Kremer, Michael & Snyder, Christopher M. & Williams, Heidi, 2022. "Optimal vaccine subsidies for endemic diseases," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 84(C).
    5. Yann Bramoullé & Habiba Djebbari & Bernard Fortin, 2020. "Peer Effects in Networks: A Survey," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 12(1), pages 603-629, August.
    6. Giovanni Cerulli, 2014. "ntreatreg: a Stata module for estimation of treatment effects in the presence of neighborhood interactions," United Kingdom Stata Users' Group Meetings 2014 15, Stata Users Group.
    7. Chanel, Olivier & Luchini, Stéphane & Massoni, Sébastien & Vergnaud, Jean-Christophe, 2011. "Impact of information on intentions to vaccinate in a potential epidemic: Swine-origin Influenza A (H1N1)," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 72(2), pages 142-148, January.
    8. Toxvaerd, Flavio, 2010. "Recurrent Infection and Externalities in Prevention," CEPR Discussion Papers 8112, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    9. Hao, Shiming, 2021. "True structure change, spurious treatment effect? A novel approach to disentangle treatment effects from structure changes," MPRA Paper 108679, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    10. Charles F. Manski, 2018. "Reasonable patient care under uncertainty," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 27(10), pages 1397-1421, October.
    11. A. Giffin & B. J. Reich & S. Yang & A. G. Rappold, 2023. "Generalized propensity score approach to causal inference with spatial interference," Biometrics, The International Biometric Society, vol. 79(3), pages 2220-2231, September.
    12. Denis Fougère & Nicolas Jacquemet, 2020. "Policy Evaluation Using Causal Inference Methods," SciencePo Working papers Main hal-03455978, HAL.
    13. Debopam Bhattacharya & Pascaline Dupas & Shin Kanaya, 2013. "Estimating the Impact of Means-tested Subsidies under Treatment Externalities with Application to Anti-Malarial Bednets," CREATES Research Papers 2013-06, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University.
    14. DiTraglia, Francis J. & García-Jimeno, Camilo & O’Keeffe-O’Donovan, Rossa & Sánchez-Becerra, Alejandro, 2023. "Identifying causal effects in experiments with spillovers and non-compliance," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 235(2), pages 1589-1624.
    15. Mate Kormos & Robert P. Lieli & Martin Huber, 2023. "Treatment Effect Analysis for Pairs with Endogenous Treatment Takeup," Papers 2301.04876, arXiv.org.
    16. Sourafel Girma & Yundan Gong & Holger Görg & Sandra Lancheros, 2016. "Estimating direct and indirect effects of foreign direct investment on firm productivity in the presence of interactions between firms," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: MULTINATIONAL ENTERPRISES AND HOST COUNTRY DEVELOPMENT, chapter 12, pages 227-239, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    17. Francis J. DiTraglia & Camilo Garcia-Jimeno & Rossa O'Keeffe-O'Donovan & Alejandro Sanchez-Becerra, 2020. "Identifying Causal Effects in Experiments with Spillovers and Non-compliance," Papers 2011.07051, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2023.
    18. Toxvaerd, F. & Rowthorn, R., 2020. "On the Management of Population Immunity," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 2080, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    19. Corey White, 2021. "Measuring Social and Externality Benefits of Influenza Vaccination," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 56(3), pages 749-785.
    20. Alan Andre Borges da Costa & Sergio Pinheiro Firpo, 2018. "An analysis of the distributive effects of public policies and their spillovers," Working Papers, Department of Economics 2018_06, University of São Paulo (FEA-USP).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • H23 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies
    • H51 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Health
    • I18 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:20432. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.