Recent studies conducted through the European School of Management and Technology – ESMT Berlin, a member establishment of UNAI in Germany, and the University of Texas at Dallas – UTD (USA). They tested how governments inform the public about the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The study team consisted of Professor Francis de Véricourt, Director of the Center for Decisions, Models and Data (DMD-Center) at ESMT Berlin, Huseyin Gurkan, Assistant Professor of Management Sciences at ESMT Berlin and Shouqiang Wang, Associate Professor of Operations. Management at UTD.
The study found that the more asymmetric a disease’s economic influence on a population, the less its government can overestimate the severity of the epidemic. The study predicts that governments are more likely to minimize the severity of an outbreak if they prefer to prioritize a healthy economy over public health. The opposite is true for governments that prioritize a healthy population over the economy, as they are more likely to overestimate the severity of the disease. In this sense, the effectiveness of restrictions depends on individuals. respect, in which political leaders influence through the dissemination of information.
Depending on their goal and the public’s belief in the risk, political leaders would likely be incentivized not to be completely transparent and even to minimize or overestimate the severity of the disease. to the public through communication strategies. They were interested in identifying when distorting disease severity, overestimating or minimizing it, would be beneficial. Reporting in this context is tricky because Americans place the trade-off between their wealth and fitness differently.
This can lead to deviations in compliance with containment measures. Governments are also faced with the task of ensuring maximum compliance while maintaining economic stability. data they have. With him in mind, the study team developed a style of game theory that took into account the trade-offs between fitness and economics faced by governments and individuals, the diversity of socioeconomic prestige within the population, and the individual has an effect of social distancing.
The framework takes into account the externalities that the individual resolution to conform or not creates for the rest of the population. The more Americans isolate, the less exposed the population is, reducing the dangers to everyone’s health. However, this decreases the individual incentive to remain confined and thus gives rise to other challenges. The effects of this study are applicable to identifying methods that governments can adopt to achieve their objectives by ensuring that prevention measures are largely adhered to, even if they may be more focused on economics than security. Public aptitude.
Economic considerations and priorities can have a significant effect on how data is presented and made publicly available. “to the COVID-19 pandemic,” says de Véricourt. In this sense, the study’s findings “suggest that governments deserve to have completely transparent data policies if they value the economy and public health similarly and are in a balance between the two,” Gurkan says.