Risk attitudes and human mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Behavioural responses to pandemics are less shaped by actual mortality or hospitalisation risks than they are by risk attitudes. We explore human mobility patterns as a measure of behavioural responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results indicate that risk-taking attitudes are a critical factor in predicting reductions in human mobility and social confinement around the globe. We find that the sharp decline in mobility after the WHO (World Health Organization) declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic can be attributed to risk attitudes. Our results suggest that regions with risk-averse attitudes are more likely to adjust their behavioural activity in response to the declaration of a pandemic even before official government lockdowns. Further understanding of the basis of responses to epidemics, e.g., precautionary behaviour, will help improve the containment of the spread of the virus.

A collaborative approach to maintaining optimal inventory and mitigating stockout risks during a pandemic: capabilities for enabling health-care supply chain resilience

“…As such, individualistic and deterministic views based on simulation and optimization that largely characterize HCSC management are no longer sufficient to address contemporary challenges in the future: objectivity, rationality, optimization, controllability (Currie et al, 2020). Failure to anticipate the radical change in behavior and perception of risk following the COVID-19 pandemic (Chan et al, 2020) signals the importance in learning from our experiences with medical stock optimization practices or the failure of individualistic risk management technics to enhance resilience against systematic HCSC disruptions caused by medical stock outs. Like disaster and emergency management agencies, organizational and state barriers prevent SC actors/agents responding to the COVID-19 pandemic from learning from each other.…”

“…The ineffectiveness of conventionally optimized inventory (quantity of stock able to meet demand between two order processing and delivery cycles) and risk management techniques could be explained by the failure to adjust for information asymmetry, radical changes in behavior and perception of uncertainty and risk (Hajmohammad and Vachon, 2016;Chan et al, 2020). Behavioral economics approaches to decision-making under uncertainty indicate that COVID-19 is unique (grey swan) in comparison to natural calamities (e.g.…”

How Does Globalization Affect COVID-19 Responses?

“…Thus, we code them as failure on the day the more restrictive policy was implemented [8]. We also stratify countries by the month of the rst con rmed COVID-19 case [9], as countries with early transmission of coronavirus have fewer other countries from which they can learn how best to respond to the pandemic [53]. This is important because disproportionally more countries with a higher globalization index contracted the virus early ( Figure S2 in the SI Appendix).…”

Plateaus, Rebounds and the Effects of Individual Behaviours in Epidemics

“…The presence of diffusion (d > 0) mitigates this effect by fueling as it were the epidemic with individuals who had initial lower risk trait. The equivalent of [14] for the average transmission rateβ is…”