On the Value of Alert Systems and Gentle Rule Enforcement in Addressing Pandemics.

ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic poses a major challenge to policy makers on how to encourage compliance to social distancing and personal protection rules. This paper compares the effectiveness of two policies that aim to increase the frequency of responsible health behavior using smartphone-tracking applications. The first involves enhanced alert capabilities, which remove social externalities and protect the users from others' reckless behavior. The second adds a rule enforcement mechanism that reduces the users' benefit from reckless behavior. Both strategies should be effective if agents are expected-value maximizers, risk averse, and behave in accordance with cumulative prospect theory (Tversky and Kahneman, 1992) or in accordance with the Cognitive Hierarchy model (Camerer et al., 2004). A mul

SUBMITTER: Roth Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7733921 | biostudies-literature | 2020

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature