Revealing the unseen: Likely half of the Americans relied on others' experience when deciding on taking the COVID-19 vaccine

Abstract

Efficient coverage for newly developed vaccines requires knowing which groups of individuals will accept the vaccine immediately and which will take longer to accept or never accept. Of those who may eventually accept the vaccine, there are two main types: success-based learners, basing their decisions on others' satisfaction, and myopic rationalists, attending to their own immediate perceived benefit. We used COVID-19 vaccination data to fit a mechanistic model capturing the distinct effects of the two types on the vaccination progress. We estimated that 47 percent of Americans behaved as myopic rationalist with a high variations across the jurisdictions, from 31 percent in Mississippi to 76 percent in Vermont. The proportion was correlated with the vaccination coverage, proportion of votes in favor of Democrats in 2020 presidential election, and education score.