Human Cultural Dimensions and Behavior during COVID-19 Can Lead to Policy Resistance and Economic Losses: A Perspective from Game Theory Analysis

Abstract

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant societal impacts. Besides loss of life there were large additional costs incurred by every country including the treatment of patients and costs to implement response plans. The pandemic resulted in major economic disruptions and stalled growth worldwide due to travel bans, lockdowns, social distancing, and non-essential business closures. Public health officials in almost every country implemented and encouraged Nonpharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) such as contact tracing, social distancing, masks, and isolation. Human behavioral decision-making concerning social isolation was a major hindrance to the success in curbing the pandemic worldwide. In many developing countries individuals’ choices were motivated by the competing risk of losing jobs, and daily income. In this chapter we focus on human behavior concerning social isolation in the context of decision-making during the pandemic. We developed a conceptual framework and deterministic model that integrated evolutionary game theory within our disease transmission model. We illustrate scenarios numerically simulating the model. This study highlights the idea that human behavior is an important component in successful disease control strategies. Economic resilience, especially in low-income countries, can improve public understanding and uptake of NPIs.

Vaccination Games of Boundedly Rational Parents toward New Childhood Immunization

“…For example, many people are motivated to conform to social norms to gain social approval and acceptance from their society, resulting in people often looking to the vaccination behavior of others as a guide for their actions. Analysis of interactions and decision-making within the population, where the outcome of each individual's decision depends on the decisions of others, is typically addressed using game-theoretic models [4,17,18,19,20,29] or agent based network models like [16]. If injunctive social norms are incorporated into the models, the actual coverage of the vaccine and the dynamics of the disease are better explained [18].…”

Cultural Perspectives, Feelings and Coping Behaviors during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Case Study of Romanian Students

“…The results were interpreted in relation to some cultural patterns usually associated with Romania (cf. Section 2 of this article), raising awareness of the (un)predictability of the younger generation's reactions to stressful situations, on the one hand, and, on the other, of the culture-bound behavior of the population, an aspect that, in our view and that of others [18,19], should be considered more often by authorities whenever they take major decisions that impact people's lives.…”