Management of ongoing pandemics and prevention of future ones requires quantifying and understanding the determinants of citizens’ decisions to comply, or not, with the public health measures designed to prevent, contain, and contrast the contagion. When deciding on compliance, citizens will trade off the costs and benefits of alternative actions. For instance, if a citizen perceives a measure – say, social distancing – as effective at reducing own infection risk, the expected risk reduction represents a key benefit from complying. Compliance with public health measures, however, may have costs in addition to benefits, both monetary and psychological. Ultimately, whether a person complies–and, if so, systematically or only in certain circumstances–will depend both on the perceived costs and benefits and on how the person trades these off. Different people may have partially different costs and benefits and/or may weigh them differently, possible depending on their characteristics and experiences. Separately quantifying the roles of expectations and preferences in determining compliance decisions is fundamental for policy.
In this paper we study these issues by leveraging recent advances in survey design and econometric analysis of probabilistic expectations. We run two surveys in the United Kingdom and in Italy during the first lockdown regarding the individuals’ perceived costs and benefits from complying with the social distancing measures implemented - including subjective probabilities of contracting Coronavirus, being hospitalized or fined, becoming unemployed or socially isolated. We first develop and estimate a model of compliance behavior and unpack the importance of expected costs and benefits, cost-benefit tradeoffs, and their heterogeneity across citizens’ backgrounds and experiences. We then quantify the monetary compensation required to be socially isolated-providing key information to policymakers. Last, we evaluate the impacts of policy measures on citizens’ risk perceptions and compliance behaviors through randomized information & sensitization interventions and elicitation of individual responses to policy-relevant scenarios. |
