Individual costs and societal benefits of interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Individual and societal reactions to an ongoing pandemic can lead to social dilemmas: In some cases, each individual is tempted to not follow an intervention, but for the whole society it would be best if they did. Now that in most countries the extent of regulations to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission is very small, interventions are driven by individual decision-making. Assuming that individuals act in their best own interest, we propose a framework in which this situation can be quantified, depending on the protection the intervention provides to a user and to others, the risk of getting infected, and the costs of the intervention. We discuss when a tension between individual and societal benefits arises and which parameter comparisons are important to distinguish between different regimes of intervention use.

Prosocial dynamics in multiagent systems

“…As cooperation involves a cost, reaching the minimal number of cooperators required for cooperative efforts to become consequential is not an easy task. This is the challenge, for instance, when countries are called to cooperate by reducing CO 2 emissions (Milinski et al 2008;Santos & Pacheco 2011) or when individuals are asked to cooperate by wearing masks to prevent a virus from spreading (Traulsen, Levin, & Saad-Roy 2023). In these domains, underestimating the cooperative efforts of individuals around us might impact our own willingness to cooperate-in fact, humans often reveal to be conditional cooperators (Fischbacher, Gächter, & Fehr 2001).…”

“…Understanding the roots of cooperation, and the institutions, social norms, and artifacts that might sustain it, is fundamental in various domains-from climate change (Bisaro & Hinkel 2016) and responsible use of natural resources (Dietz, Ostrom, & Stern 2003) to pandemic control (Traulsen, Levin, & Saad-Roy 2023). In interna-tional relations, cooperation is still fundamental to prevent arms races, nuclear proliferation, and military escalation, as noted already in the 80s (Axelrod 1984).…”

Individual costs and societal benefits of interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…A mathematica notebook (*.nb) to reproduce Fig. 2 has been deposited in Zenodo ( https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7899576 ) ( 43 ). All study data are included in the main text.…”

The complex interplay between risk tolerance and the spread of infectious diseases

“…In this study, we aim to analyze the impact of heterogeneity in risk tolerance and the resulting behavioral response on the dynamics of epidemics. We seek to add to a burgeoning literature on the impact of human behavior in epidemic response [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31], which the recent pandemic highlighted as an area for further exploration in preparation for the next large scale global health crisis [32][33][34]. To study the impact of heterogeneity in risk tolerance on epidemic dynamics, we introduce a simple and flexible modeling framework based on ordinary differential equations that can be used for different interventions and an arbitrary partitioning of the population with regard to risk tolerance and behavioral responses.…”