Informing the Public About a Pandemic
研究政府如何通过信息设计引导公众遵守防疫措施，发现政府若偏重经济或健康会扭曲疫情严重性信息，经济不平等加剧时政府更倾向于淡化疫情。
This paper explores how governments may efficiently inform the public about an epidemic to induce compliance with their confinement measures. Using an information design framework, we find the government has an incentive to either downplay or exaggerate the severity of the epidemic if it heavily prioritizes the economy over population health or vice versa. Importantly, we find that the level of economic inequality in the population has an effect on these distortions. The more unequal the disease’s economic impact on the population, the less the government exaggerates and the more it downplays the severity of the epidemic. When the government weighs the economy and population health sufficiently equally, however, the government should always be fully transparent about the severity of the epidemic. This paper was accepted by Stefan Scholtes, healthcare management.