IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/qjecon/v139y2024i1p359-417..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

An Economic Framework for Vaccine Prioritization

Author

Listed:
  • Mohammad Akbarpour
  • Eric Budish
  • Piotr Dworczak
  • Scott Duke Kominers

Abstract

We propose an economic framework for determining the optimal allocation of a scarce supply of vaccines that become gradually available during a public health crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Agents differ in observable and unobservable characteristics, and the designer maximizes a social welfare function over all feasible mechanisms—accounting for agents’ characteristics, as well as their endogenous behavior in the face of the pandemic. The framework emphasizes the role of externalities and incorporates equity as well as efficiency concerns. Our results provide an economic justification for providing vaccines immediately and for free to some groups of agents, while at the same time showing that a carefully constructed pricing mechanism can improve outcomes by screening for individuals with the highest private and social benefits of receiving the vaccine. The solution casts light on the classic question of whether prices or priorities should be used to allocate scarce public resources under externalities and equity concerns.

Suggested Citation

  • Mohammad Akbarpour & Eric Budish & Piotr Dworczak & Scott Duke Kominers, 2024. "An Economic Framework for Vaccine Prioritization," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 139(1), pages 359-417.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:139:y:2024:i:1:p:359-417.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjad022
    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. Vincent Meisner & Pascal Pillath, 2024. "Monetizing digital content with network effects: A mechanism-design approach," Papers 2408.15196, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2024.
    2. Alireza Fallah & Michael I. Jordan & Annie Ulichney, 2024. "Fair Allocation in Dynamic Mechanism Design," Papers 2406.00147, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2024.
    3. Davide Bosco & Luca Portoghese, 2024. "Complementarity, Congestion and Information Design in Epidemics with Strategic Social Behaviour," DEM Working Papers Series 218, University of Pavia, Department of Economics and Management.
    4. Vincent Meisner & Pascal Pillath, 2024. "Monetizing digital content with network effects: A mechanism-design approach," Berlin School of Economics Discussion Papers 0049, Berlin School of Economics.
    5. Holger Strulik & Volker Grossmann, 2024. "Beyond Covid: Pandemics and the Economics of Aging and Longevity," CESifo Working Paper Series 11104, CESifo.
    6. Stankov, Petar, 2024. "Will voters polarize over pandemic restrictions? Theory and evidence from COVID-19," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 136(C).

    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:qjecon:v:139:y:2024:i:1:p:359-417.. 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 (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/qje .

    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.