Managing Contagion: COVID, Public Health, and Reflexive Behavior

John Davis

No 2022-03, Working Papers and Research from Marquette University, Center for Global and Economic Studies and Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper characterizes a pandemic as one kind of contagion, and defines a contagion as a two-level, two-direction, reflexive feedback loop system. In such a system, experts' opinions can act as self-fulfilling prophecies that significantly influence social behavior. Also, when multiple experts produce multiple, expert opinions can fragment a society's response to a pandemic worsening rather than ameliorating it. This paper models this with two competing expert opinions, associates them with club good and common pool goods types of circumstances, and argues that to combat fragmentation of opinion a focus on public health public good provision needs to be framed in public choice terms, specifically as choices regarding the nature of democratic deliberative institutions. From a constitutional political economy perspective, it argues this entails asking how public reasoning processes can function in an 'inclusive and noncoercive' way that allows society to reconcile competing visions regarding such issues as how to combat a pandemic.

Keywords: COVID-19; contagion; self-fulfilling prophecy; public health; club goods; common pool goods; public choice; democratic deliberation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 H41 H70 I10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-hea, nep-hme and nep-pke
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://epublications.marquette.edu/econ_workingpapers/84 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:mrq:wpaper:2022-03

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers and Research from Marquette University, Center for Global and Economic Studies and Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andrew G. Meyer ().