Behavioral Economics in the Epidemiology of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Theory and Simulations

Abstract

We provide a game-theoretical epidemiological model for the COVID-19 pandemic that takes into account that: (1) asymptomatic individuals can be contagious, (2) contagion is behavior-dependent, (3) behavior is determined by a game that depends on beliefs and social interactions, (4) there can be systematic biases in the perceptions and beliefs about the pandemic. We incorporate lockdown decisions by the government into the model. The citizens’ and government’s beliefs can exhibit several biases that we discuss from the point of view of behavioral economics. We provide simulations to understand the effect of lockdown decisions and the possibility of “nudging” citizens in the right direction by improving the accuracy of their beliefs.

Social Impacts of Post-Covid-19: Resilience and Recover of Tourism in Portugal

“…Several segments of society around world were hit in many aspects, education, commerce, transport, leisure, among others. This phenomenon has a huge economic impact in all countries (Kliger, 2021;Lopez et al, 2022), and also changes the routine and way of living in majority of society activities: Education (Chairunnisak et al, 2022;Campbell et al, 2021;Zhu et al, 2022;Koh & Daniel, 2022), Work (Massar et al, 2022), Urban Behaviour (Long & Liu, 2021;Fujii et al, 2021;Saw et al, 2021), Medical Education (McKinley & Ghaffarifar, 2021), Psychology (Kollamparambil & Oyenubi, 2021), Healthcare (Gadi et al, 2022), among others. But probably the activity which certainly suffered most from this impact was the Tourism, "no travel, no tourists".…”

Assessing the relationship between delay discounting and decisions to engage in various protective behaviors during COVID-19

“…There are several reasons why delay discounting is a promising behavioral economic measure for public health purposes and one that may be leveraged to address health crises on a global scale. Incorporating behavioral economic measures, such as delay discounting, into forecasting models of disease spread could enhance the accuracy of predictions and allow for the implementation of targeted interventions to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 (Marin-Lopez et al, 2022 ). Furthermore, unlike self-report measures that explicitly ask participants to reflect on their decision-making tendencies, delay discounting tasks measure decision-making behavior in a less conspicuous and more objective way (Myerson et al, 2001 ).…”