The Corona-Pandemic: A Game-Theoretic Perspective on Regional and Global Governance
用最弱环节公共品博弈模型分析各国抗疫措施中的激励结构，指出协调与合作难题，并探讨自我执行条约如何促进区域和全球合作。
We argue that the incentive structure of all individual and coordinated measures across countries to contain the corona-pandemic is that of a weakest-link public good game. We discuss a selection of theoretical and experimental key results of weakest-link games and interpret them in the light of the corona-pandemic. First, we highlight that experimental evidence does not support the assumption that coordination can be trivially solved, even among symmetric players. Second, we argue that for asymmetric countries the weakest-link game does not only pose a problem of coordination, but also a problem of cooperation. Third, we show how and under which conditions self-enforcing treaties can foster coordination and cooperation. We account for the possibility that countries make mistakes when choosing their actions. Our discussion shows that North-South cooperation is relevant and likely to be self-enforcing and that regional cooperation, e.g., within the EU, will also be important.