Health Externalities and Policy: The Role of Social Preferences
研究利用全球258个城市的移动数据和社会偏好实验指标，发现利他、耐心和低负向互惠的社会偏好能减少疫情中的出行，使政策更有效，对行为经济学和公共政策制定者有参考价值。
Social preferences facilitate the internalization of health externalities, for example, by reducing mobility during a pandemic. We test this hypothesis using mobility data from 258 cities worldwide alongside experimentally validated measures of social preferences. Controlling for time-varying heterogeneity that could arise at the level at which mitigation policies are implemented, we find that they matter less in regions that are more altruistic, patient, or exhibit less negative reciprocity. In those regions, mobility falls ahead of lockdowns, and remains low after the lifting thereof. Our results elucidate the importance, independent of the cultural context, of social preferences in fostering cooperative behavior. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis.