Online Search Behavior Related to the COVID-19 Vaccine: An Infodemiology Study (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Vaccination against COVID-19 is an important public health strategy to address the ongoing pandemic. Examination of online search behavior related to the COVID-19 vaccine can provide insights into the public's awareness, concerns, and interest regarding COVID-19 vaccination. OBJECTIVE The goal of this study is to describe online search behavior related to the COVID-19 during the beginning of public vaccination efforts in the US. METHODS We examined Google Trends data from 1-1-2021 through 3-16-2021 to determine the relative search volume (RSV) for vaccine related searches. We also examined search query log data for COVID-19 vaccine-related searches and identified five categories of searches: 1) General or other information, 2) Vaccine availability, 3) Vaccine maker, 4) Vaccine side-effects and safety, and 5) Vaccine myths and conspiracy beliefs. We report on the proportion and trends for these different categories of vaccine-related searches. RESULTS In the first quarter of 2021, the proportion of all online queries that were related to the COVID-19 vaccine increased from approximately 10% to nearly 50% of all COVID-19 related queries (P<.001). The proportion of COVID-19 vaccine queries that addressed vaccine availability increased from 36% to 44% (P =.05) including a particularly notable increase in the proportion of COVID-19 vaccine queries that included the name of a specific pharmacy (5% to 27%, P=.007). Queries related to vaccine side-effects or safety represented fewer than 5% of all searches and queries related to specific vaccine myths and conspiracy belief represented less than 1% of all COVID-19 vaccine-related searches throughout the study period. CONCLUSIONS This study demonstrates an increase in online search behavior related to the COVID-19 vaccine in early 2021 along with an increase in the proportion of these searches that were related to vaccine availability. These findings are consistent with an increase in public interest and intention to vaccinate during the initial phase of public COVID-19 vaccination efforts.

COVID-19 and the Demand for Online Grocery Shopping: Empirical Evidence from the Netherlands

There has been a pronounced increase in online shopping since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We study the effect of the pandemic on demand for online grocery shopping specifically, using municipality-level data from a Dutch online supermarket. We find that an additional hospital admission increased app traffic by 7.3 percent and sales per order by 0.31 percent. Local hospital admissions do not correlate with the variety of groceries ordered, but online search behavior does, suggesting that hoarding behavior is driven by the general perception and impact of the virus rather than local conditions. Local COVID-19 conditions also have different effects in urban versus non-urban municipalities, with local hospital admissions increasing app traffic in urban areas but lowering sales per order as compared to non-urban areas. It remains to be seen whether the demand for online grocery shopping will permanently increase as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

EXPRESS: Psychological Ownership of (Borrowed) Money

The current research introduces the concept of psychological ownership of borrowed money, a construct that represents how much consumers feel that borrowed money is their own. We observe both individual-level and contextual-level variation in the degree to which consumers feel psychological ownership of borrowed money, and variation on this dimension predicts willingness to borrow money for discretionary purchases. At an individual level, psychological ownership of borrowed money is distinct from other individual factors such as debt aversion, financial literacy, income, intertemporal discounting, materialism, propensity to plan, self-control, spare money, and tightwad-spendthrift tendencies, and it predicts willingness to borrow above and beyond these factors. At a contextual level, we document systematic differences in psychological ownership between different debt types. We show that these differences in psychological ownership manifest in consumers’ online search behavior and explain consumers’ differential interest in borrowing across debt types. Finally, we demonstrate that psychological ownership of borrowed money is malleable, such that framing debt in terms of lower psychological ownership can reduce consumers’ propensity to borrow.

COVID-19 is Feminine: Grammatical Gender Influences Future Danger Perceptions and Precautionary Behavior

Gendered languages assign masculine and feminine grammatical gender to all nouns, including nonhuman entities. In French, Italian, and Spanish, the name of the disease resulting from the virus (COVID-19) is grammatically feminine, whereas the virus that causes the disease (coronavirus) is masculine. In this research, we test whether the grammatical gender mark matters. In a series of experiments with French and Spanish speakers, we find that grammatical gender affects virus-related judgments consistent with gender stereotypes: feminine- (vs. masculine-) marked terms for the virus decrease perceptions of future danger of the virus and reduce intentions to take precautionary behavioral measures to mitigate contraction and spread of the virus (e.g., avoiding restaurants, movies, travel). Secondary data analyses of online search behavior for France, Spain, and Italy further demonstrate this negative relation between the anticipated threat (daily new cases and deaths, search for masks) and usage of the feminine- (vs. masculine-) marked terms for the coronavirus. These effects occur even though the grammatical gender assignment is semantically arbitrary.