Most governments employ a set of quasi-standard measures to fight COVID-19 including wearing masks, social distancing, virus testing, contact tracing, and vaccination. However, combining these measures into an efficient holistic pandemic response instrument is even more involved than anticipated. 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 mask wearing, social distancing and vaccination, and how these may result in sub-optimal outcomes. We also demonstrate the responsibility of national authorities in designing these games properly regarding data transparency, 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; moreover, there is no one-size-fits-all solution when designing an effective solution.
翻译:大多数国家政府都采用一套准标准措施来打击COVID-19,包括戴面具、社会失常、病毒检测、接触追踪和接种疫苗。然而,将这些措施纳入高效的整体大流行病应对工具比预期的要多。我们认为,这些措施效力不同的一些非三重因素是自私的决策和各国执行反应机制的不同。在本文中,我们通过简单的游戏展示了个人奖励措施对关于戴面具、社会失常和接种疫苗的决定的影响,以及这些奖励措施如何导致低于最佳效果。我们还表明国家当局有责任在数据透明度、所选择的政策及其对优先结果的影响方面适当设计这些游戏。我们提倡一种机制设计办法:在实行各自的流行病应对机制时,谨慎平衡社会公益和应对成本,符合每个政府的最大利益;此外,在设计有效的解决方案时,没有一刀切的解决办法。