Social Interactions in Pandemics: Fear, Altruism, and Reciprocity

Laura Alfaro, Ester Faia, Nora Lamersdorf and Farzad Saidi

No 27134, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Social interactions and social preferences play a central role in public health domains. In the face of a pandemic, individuals adjust their behavior, whereas in SIR models infection rates are typically exogenous. City-level data across countries suggest that mobility falls in response to fear, proxied by Google searches. Incorporating experimentally validated measures of social preferences at the regional level, we find that stringency measures matter less when individuals are more patient, altruistic, or exhibit less negative reciprocity. To account for these findings, we extend homogeneous and networked SIR models by endogenizing agents' social-activity intensity and incorporating social preferences. Our quantitative predictions markedly differ from those of the naïve SIR network model. We derive the planner's problem, and show that neglecting agents' endogenous response leads to misguided policy decisions of various non-pharmaceutical interventions. Any further mobility restrictions, beyond agents' restraint, result from aggregate externalities which are curtailed by social preferences.

JEL-codes: D62 D64 D85 D91 I10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-net, nep-soc and nep-ure
Note: EFG EH IFM
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (74)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27134.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Social Interactions in Pandemics: Fear, Altruism, and Reciprocity (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27134

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27134

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().