Authors’ Reply to Sprengholz and Betsch: “Willingness to Pay for a COVID-19 Vaccine”

Excerpt

The microeconomic theory of consumption clearly indicates that as the price of normal goods increases, the demand for them falls [1]. The SARs-CoV-2 vaccine is no exception. In their letter to the editor, Sprengholz and Betsch [2] noted that as the values of the payment vectors in our study [3] increase, the number of individuals who are willing to pay decreases. However, one must consider that the values of individuals’ willingness to pay, which reflect their valuation of the goods or service, differ from market prices that may be charged for a COVID-19 vaccine. Meaning, the market prices that individuals will pay for private vaccine provision may not be similar or equal to those of the bid vectors in our study [3]. The values shown by the willingness-to-pay studies [4, 5] represent individuals’ average valuation of the SAR-CoV-2 vaccine: the quantified subjective valuation and not the market price. …