IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/econjl/v134y2024i659p913-933..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do Celebrity Endorsements Matter? A Twitter Experiment Promoting Vaccination in Indonesia

Author

Listed:
  • Vivi Alatas
  • Arun G Chandrasekhar
  • Markus Mobius
  • Benjamin A Olken
  • Cindy Paladines

Abstract

Do celebrity endorsements matter? And if so, how can celebrities communicate effectively? We conduct a nationwide Twitter experiment in Indonesia promoting vaccination. Celebrity messages are 72% more likely to be passed on or liked than similar messages without a celebrity’s imprimatur. In total, 66% of the celebrity effect comes from authorship, compared to passing on messages. Citing external medical sources decreases retweets by 27%. Phone surveys show that those randomly exposed to messaging have fewer incorrect beliefs and report more vaccination among friends and neighbours. The results can inform public health campaigns and celebrity public service more generally.

Suggested Citation

  • Vivi Alatas & Arun G Chandrasekhar & Markus Mobius & Benjamin A Olken & Cindy Paladines, 2024. "Do Celebrity Endorsements Matter? A Twitter Experiment Promoting Vaccination in Indonesia," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 134(659), pages 913-933.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:econjl:v:134:y:2024:i:659:p:913-933.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/ej/uead102
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sim, Armand & Gultom, Sarah & Widita, Alyas & Lee, Wang-Sheng & Khalil, Umair, 2024. "Sink or Swim: Testing the Roles of Science and Religion in Raising Environmental Awareness in Indonesia," IZA Discussion Papers 17184, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Cullen, Claire & Joshi, Sarthak & Vecci, Joseph & Talbot-Jones, Julia, 2024. "Female Empowerment and Male Backlash: Experimental Evidence from India," IZA Discussion Papers 17450, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    More about this item

    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:oup:econjl:v:134:y:2024:i:659:p:913-933.. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Oxford University Press or the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/resssea.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.