IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2006.06674.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Corona Games: Masks, Social Distancing and Mechanism Design

Author

Listed:
  • Balazs Pejo
  • Gergely Biczok

Abstract

Pandemic response is a complex affair. Most governments employ a set of quasi-standard measures to fight COVID-19 including wearing masks, social distancing, virus testing and contact tracing. We argue that some non-trivial factors behind the varying effectiveness of these measures are selfish decision-making and the differing national implementations of the response mechanism. In this paper, through simple games, we show the effect of individual incentives on the decisions made with respect to wearing masks and social distancing, and how these may result in a sub-optimal outcome. We also demonstrate the responsibility of national authorities in designing these games properly regarding the chosen policies and their influence on the preferred outcome. We promote a mechanism design approach: it is in the best interest of every government to carefully balance social good and response costs when implementing their respective pandemic response mechanism.

Suggested Citation

  • Balazs Pejo & Gergely Biczok, 2020. "Corona Games: Masks, Social Distancing and Mechanism Design," Papers 2006.06674, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2020.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2006.06674
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.06674
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Timothy C Reluga, 2010. "Game Theory of Social Distancing in Response to an Epidemic," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 6(5), pages 1-9, May.
    2. Peng Sun & Liu Yang & Francis de Véricourt, 2009. "Selfish Drug Allocation for Containing an International Influenza Pandemic at the Onset," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 57(6), pages 1320-1332, December.
    3. Eric S. Maskin, 2008. "Mechanism Design: How to Implement Social Goals," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(3), pages 567-576, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Patrick Mellacher, 2020. "Cooperation in the Age of COVID-19: Evidence from Public Goods Games," Papers 2011.09189, arXiv.org.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Ceddia, M.G. & Bardsley, N.O. & Goodwin, R. & Holloway, G.J. & Nocella, G. & Stasi, A., 2013. "A complex system perspective on the emergence and spread of infectious diseases: Integrating economic and ecological aspects," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 90(C), pages 124-131.
    2. Bauer, Johannes M., 2014. "Platforms, systems competition, and innovation: Reassessing the foundations of communications policy," Telecommunications Policy, Elsevier, vol. 38(8), pages 662-673.
    3. Linus Nyiwul, 2021. "Epidemic Control and Resource Allocation: Approaches and Implications for the Management of COVID-19," Studies in Microeconomics, , vol. 9(2), pages 283-305, December.
    4. Yunhan Huang & Quanyan Zhu, 2022. "Game-Theoretic Frameworks for Epidemic Spreading and Human Decision-Making: A Review," Dynamic Games and Applications, Springer, vol. 12(1), pages 7-48, March.
    5. Sauermann, Jan & Beckmann, Paul, 2019. "The influence of group size on distributional fairness under voting by veto," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 90-102.
    6. Kornai, János, 2013. "Bevezetés a Központosítás és piaci reform című kötethez [Introduction to the volume Centralization and Market Reform]," Közgazdasági Szemle (Economic Review - monthly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Közgazdasági Szemle Alapítvány (Economic Review Foundation), vol. 0(3), pages 253-281.
    7. Carnehl, Christoph & Fukuda, Satoshi & Kos, Nenad, 2023. "Epidemics with behavior," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 207(C).
    8. Gregory Gutin & Tomohiro Hirano & Sung-Ha Hwang & Philip R. Neary & Alexis Akira Toda, 2021. "The effect of social distancing on the reach of an epidemic in social networks," Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination, Springer;Society for Economic Science with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents, vol. 16(3), pages 629-647, July.
    9. Mohler, George & Bertozzi, Andrea L. & Carter, Jeremy & Short, Martin B. & Sledge, Daniel & Tita, George E. & Uchida, Craig D. & Brantingham, P. Jeffrey, 2020. "Impact of social distancing during COVID-19 pandemic on crime in Los Angeles and Indianapolis," Journal of Criminal Justice, Elsevier, vol. 68(C).
    10. Han, Dun & Sun, Mei, 2016. "An evolutionary vaccination game in the modified activity driven network by considering the closeness," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 443(C), pages 49-57.
    11. Mercado, Ruben, 2013. "Development indices, inequality, and applied development policy analysis: some issues for discussion," MPRA Paper 58018, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    12. Caixia Wang & Huijie Li, 2022. "Public Compliance Matters in Evidence-Based Public Health Policy: Evidence from Evaluating Social Distancing in the First Wave of COVID-19," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(7), pages 1-13, March.
    13. Yunhan Huang & Tao Zhang & Quanyan Zhu, 2022. "The Inverse Problem of Linear-Quadratic Differential Games: When is a Control Strategies Profile Nash?," Papers 2207.05303, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2022.
    14. Amaral, Marco A. & Oliveira, Marcelo M. de & Javarone, Marco A., 2021. "An epidemiological model with voluntary quarantine strategies governed by evolutionary game dynamics," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 143(C).
    15. Bian, Zheyong & Liu, Xiang & Bai, Yun, 2020. "Mechanism design for on-demand first-mile ridesharing," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 138(C), pages 77-117.
    16. Westerink-Duijzer, L.E. & Schlicher, L.P.J. & Musegaas, M., 2019. "Fair allocations for cooperation problems in vaccination," Econometric Institute Research Papers EI2019-06, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus School of Economics (ESE), Econometric Institute.
    17. Manitra A. Rakotoarisoa, 2016. "Trade with Endogenous Market Power Under Asymmetric and Incomplete Information," Journal of Industry, Competition and Trade, Springer, vol. 16(4), pages 423-440, December.
    18. Martin Shubik, 2011. "The Present and Future of Game Theory," Levine's Working Paper Archive 786969000000000173, David K. Levine.
    19. Martin P. Shanahan & John K. Wilson & William E. Becker, 2012. "Following Zahka: Using Nobel Prize Winners’ Speeches and Ideas to Teach Economics," The Journal of Economic Education, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 43(2), pages 190-199, April.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:arx:papers:2006.06674. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    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.