How Much Are Individual Choices Worth

PAOLO PIN HIGHLIGHTS SOCIAL MECHANISMS THAT MAKE CONTAINMENT POLICIES EFFECTIVE OR INEFFECTIVE

The lockdown imposed or suggested in many countries around the world to contain Covid-19 has already shown its greatest effectiveness where most people complied with restrictions. This evidence has prompted new questions about the role and value of individual choices.
"I have always dealt with social relation networks and game theory to study how ideas, news and trends spread within a society," summarizes Paolo Pin, Fellow of the COVID Crisis Lab, Professor of Microeconomics and co-author of the study COVID-19: unless one gets everyone to act, policies may be ineffective or even backfire.
 
“At the beginning of the year I was planning a vaccination study”, he says, “but then this virus came and I decided to change targets. However, the goal is not very different: we want to demonstrate that, when you want to limit the spread of something, requirements must be adhered to, especially by those subjects or social groups that have the most contacts. Ironically, if people with lots of contacts reduce them proportionally less than those who don't have many, the risk is that the disease will be incubated, making it endemic and therefore making containment policies counterproductive.”
 
To validate what has been worked out in theory, the study cross-references data relating to the spread of the coronavirus with that of social contacts. Data was taken from the aggregated information provided by several social networks, data sets from phone companies and the many surveys carried out in recent weeks. A direct correlation between infections and contacts in an evolutionary span of 2-4 weeks in macro-areas such as Italian Regions or the US states will then be evaluated.
 
“It will be confirmed that where a quarantine was imposed, containment was faster, while where there was more room for individual choices, the measures were less effective,” predicts the professor. “So I don’t expect surprises, but this is not the purpose of the research. Instead, it aims to offer new data to the debate on the value of the choices of individuals. And it should not only be considered on a small scale, within municipalities or cities, there should be a consideration of the significance when a region or a state within a community is making different choices.”

by Emanuele Elli