... Email: fabio.sabatini@euricse.eu. ... superficial, and transitory (Wirth 1938, p. 1). This a... more ... Email: fabio.sabatini@euricse.eu. ... superficial, and transitory (Wirth 1938, p. 1). This argument can be easily applied to the internet, which seems to have the potential to fragment local communities into new virtual realities of shared interest that may negate the necessity (or even ...
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Sep 1, 2022
We build an evolutionary game-theoretic model of the interaction between policymakers and experts... more We build an evolutionary game-theoretic model of the interaction between policymakers and experts in shaping the policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Players’ decisions concern two alternative strategies of pandemic management: a “hard” approach, enforcing potentially unpopular measures such as strict confinement orders, and a “soft” approach, based upon voluntary and short-lived social distancing. Policymakers’ decisions may also rely upon expert advice. Unlike experts, policymakers are sensitive to a public consensus incentive that makes lifting restrictions as soon as possible especially desirable. This incentive may conflict with the overall goal of mitigating the effects of the pandemic, leading to a typical policy dilemma. We show that the selection of strategies may be path-dependent, as their initial distribution is a crucial driver of players’ choices. Contingent on cultural factors and the epidemiological conditions, steady states in which both types of players unanimously endorse the strict strategy can coexist with others where experts and policymakers agree on the soft strategy, depending on the initial conditions. The model can also lead to attractive asymmetric equilibria where experts and policymakers endorse different strategies, or to cyclical dynamics where the shares of adoption of strategies oscillate indefinitely around a mixed strategy equilibrium. This multiplicity of equilibria can explain the coexistence of contrasting pandemic countermeasures observed across countries in the first wave of the outbreak. Our results suggest that cross-country differences in the COVID-19 policy response need not be the effect of poor decision making. Instead, they can endogenously result from the interplay between policymakers and experts incentives under the local social, cultural and epidemiological conditions.
This paper studies environmental corruption via a random‐matching evolutionary game between a pop... more This paper studies environmental corruption via a random‐matching evolutionary game between a population of firms and a population of bureaucrats who have to decide whether to release a ‘green’ licence to the firms. A firm obtains the licence if the bureaucrat checks that it complies with environmental regulations, otherwise it is sanctioned. The model assumes that there are two types of bureaucrats (honest and dishonest), two types of firms (compliant and non‐compliant) and two possible crimes (corruption and extortion). Corruption occurs when a dishonest bureaucrat accepts a bribe from a non‐compliant firm, while extortion occurs when a dishonest bureaucrat claims a bribe from a compliant firm. When there is no dominance of strategies, we show that there exist two bi‐stable regimes, in which two attractive stationary states exist and two regimes with an internal stable equilibrium, corresponding to the mixed‐strategy Nash equilibrium of the one‐shot static game, surrounded by clos...
... Email: fabio.sabatini@euricse.eu. ... superficial, and transitory (Wirth 1938, p. 1). This a... more ... Email: fabio.sabatini@euricse.eu. ... superficial, and transitory (Wirth 1938, p. 1). This argument can be easily applied to the internet, which seems to have the potential to fragment local communities into new virtual realities of shared interest that may negate the necessity (or even ...
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Sep 1, 2022
We build an evolutionary game-theoretic model of the interaction between policymakers and experts... more We build an evolutionary game-theoretic model of the interaction between policymakers and experts in shaping the policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Players’ decisions concern two alternative strategies of pandemic management: a “hard” approach, enforcing potentially unpopular measures such as strict confinement orders, and a “soft” approach, based upon voluntary and short-lived social distancing. Policymakers’ decisions may also rely upon expert advice. Unlike experts, policymakers are sensitive to a public consensus incentive that makes lifting restrictions as soon as possible especially desirable. This incentive may conflict with the overall goal of mitigating the effects of the pandemic, leading to a typical policy dilemma. We show that the selection of strategies may be path-dependent, as their initial distribution is a crucial driver of players’ choices. Contingent on cultural factors and the epidemiological conditions, steady states in which both types of players unanimously endorse the strict strategy can coexist with others where experts and policymakers agree on the soft strategy, depending on the initial conditions. The model can also lead to attractive asymmetric equilibria where experts and policymakers endorse different strategies, or to cyclical dynamics where the shares of adoption of strategies oscillate indefinitely around a mixed strategy equilibrium. This multiplicity of equilibria can explain the coexistence of contrasting pandemic countermeasures observed across countries in the first wave of the outbreak. Our results suggest that cross-country differences in the COVID-19 policy response need not be the effect of poor decision making. Instead, they can endogenously result from the interplay between policymakers and experts incentives under the local social, cultural and epidemiological conditions.
This paper studies environmental corruption via a random‐matching evolutionary game between a pop... more This paper studies environmental corruption via a random‐matching evolutionary game between a population of firms and a population of bureaucrats who have to decide whether to release a ‘green’ licence to the firms. A firm obtains the licence if the bureaucrat checks that it complies with environmental regulations, otherwise it is sanctioned. The model assumes that there are two types of bureaucrats (honest and dishonest), two types of firms (compliant and non‐compliant) and two possible crimes (corruption and extortion). Corruption occurs when a dishonest bureaucrat accepts a bribe from a non‐compliant firm, while extortion occurs when a dishonest bureaucrat claims a bribe from a compliant firm. When there is no dominance of strategies, we show that there exist two bi‐stable regimes, in which two attractive stationary states exist and two regimes with an internal stable equilibrium, corresponding to the mixed‐strategy Nash equilibrium of the one‐shot static game, surrounded by clos...
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