Informing the Public About a Pandemic

Véricourt, Francis de; Gürkan, Hüseyin; Wang, Shouqiang

doi:10.1287/mnsc.2021.4016

Cited by 32 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Related to information provision, [11] presents an activity-based model where the principal informs agents of the infection rate and identifies when full disclosure maximizes society's expected welfare. Most closely related to our work, [9] presents a macro-perspective on how central planners can provision information about unknown stochastic risk during a pandemic. Our setting is more general than [9], as their central planner seeks to globally optimize over an objective function that takes a weighted average of functional measures of the economic health and infectious health.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most closely related to our work, [9] presents a macro-perspective on how central planners can provision information about unknown stochastic risk during a pandemic. Our setting is more general than [9], as their central planner seeks to globally optimize over an objective function that takes a weighted average of functional measures of the economic health and infectious health. In contrast, our setup allows for a larger class of objectives that can incorporate other practically relevant factors.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The insight given by Lemma 3.3 consequently reduces the search over all possible mechanisms π to those that use at most K + 1 signals and can be represented by a T π with at most K + 1 tuples. Using this reduction, we can without loss of optimality restrict the problem (9) to simpler signalling mechanisms T π with less than K + 1 tuples. Notice that if we had simply specified {(q i , θ i )} i∈[ K+1] instead of deriving it from a particular π, we might be optimizing over tuples that cannot actually be implemented by a mechanism π.…”

Section: Lemma 33 There Exists An Optimal Mechanism πmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We now exploit the above reduction and solve for the optimal mechanism that solves (9). Define the increasing function h(θ) := sup{s :…”

Section: Lemma 33 There Exists An Optimal Mechanism πmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, a central planner can influence agents' choices by incentivizing safer alternative actions or penalizing riskier actions. Soft interventions are generally much less costly to implement than hard interventions, however their design is a nascent area of study [9,10,11]. Our work in this paper is motivated by the public health gains that can be achieved by strategic provision of information.…”

Section: Introduction 1motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Optimal Information Provision for Strategic Hybrid Workers

Shah¹,

Amin²,

Jaillet³

2022

Preprint

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We study the problem of information provision by a strategic central planner who can publicly signal about an uncertain infectious risk parameter. Signalling leads to an updated public belief over the parameter, and agents then make equilibrium choices on whether to work remotely or in-person. The planner maintains a set of desirable outcomes for each realization of the uncertain parameter and seeks to maximize the probability that agents choose an acceptable outcome for the true parameter. We distinguish between stateless and stateful objectives. In the former, the set of desirable outcomes does not change as a function of the risk parameter, whereas in the latter it does. For stateless objectives, we reduce the problem to maximizing the probability of inducing mean beliefs that lie in intervals computable from the set of desirable outcomes. We derive the optimal signalling mechanism and show that it partitions the parameter domain into at most two intervals with the signals generated according to an interval-specific distribution. For the stateful case, we consider a practically relevant situation in which the planner can enforce in-person work capacity limits that progressively get more stringent as the risk parameter increases. We show that the optimal signalling mechanism for this case can be obtained by solving a linear program. We numerically verify the improvement in achieving desirable outcomes using our information design relative to no information and full information benchmarks.

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Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Lemma 33 There Exists An Optimal Mechanism πmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We now exploit the above reduction and solve for the optimal mechanism that solves (9). Define the increasing function h(θ) := sup{s :…”

Section: Lemma 33 There Exists An Optimal Mechanism πmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introduction 1motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Optimal Information Provision for Strategic Hybrid Workers

Shah¹,

Amin²,

Jaillet³

2022

Preprint

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Will the substitution policy resolve the shortage of personal protection equipment?

Chen,

Chen

2024

Naval Research Logistics

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Personal protective equipment (PPE) like face mask is important in managing pandemic. Typically, there exist different standards for face masks such as N95 and KN95. In response to the supply shortages of N95 mask in 2020, KN95 mask was allowed to be sold in U.S. to substitute the standard product N95. This paper considers when suppliers make products to supply both domestic and overseas markets with different product standards (i.e., the standard product for domestic/overseas market is the ordinary/high‐type product), and explore the impact of the substitution policy of allowing the ordinary product as a substitutable product in the overseas market. Analytically we prove that this substitution policy is win‐win by increasing the sales in both markets when ordinary and high‐type products are close substitutes in the presence of strong diseconomies of scale in material supply, or the high‐type product has a dominant competitive advantage in the presence of strong economies of scale in material supply. By contrast, the substitution policy is lose‐lose by decreasing the sales in both markets when the competitive advantage of the high‐type product is small in the presence of strong economies of scale in material supply. Moreover, numerical studies with the real data show the robustness of our analytical findings, and unfold the backfire of imposing export restriction on the standard product for domestic market.

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Behavioral Economic Consequences of Disasters: A Basis for Inclusion in Benefit–Cost Analysis

Rose

2022

EconDisCliCha

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The purpose of this paper is to develop an analytical framework for estimating the behavioral effects of disasters and their economic consequences. The reduction of these losses represents the benefits of pre-disaster mitigation and post-disaster recovery. We provide conceptualizations, definitions, classifications, and a formal welfare analysis of this category of economic consequences. We also examine methods used to measure behavioral reactions to fear for insight into improving their delineation. Because we are interested in a comprehensive assessment of behavioral effects, we also include resilience adjustments and extend our initial partial equilibrium analysis to the general equilibrium level. The analysis is intended to serve as the basis for the legitimate inclusion of behavioral consequences of disasters in benefit-cost analysis.

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Informing the Public About a Pandemic

Cited by 32 publications

References 24 publications

Optimal Information Provision for Strategic Hybrid Workers

Optimal Information Provision for Strategic Hybrid Workers

Will the substitution policy resolve the shortage of personal protection equipment?

Behavioral Economic Consequences of Disasters: A Basis for Inclusion in Benefit–Cost Analysis

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