Coronavirus contact tracing and conditional cooperation, Part 2

No sooner had I hit 'publish' on my post yesterday on coronavirus contact tracing, than I ran across this article in The Conversation by Richard Holden (University of New South Wales). I finished up my post by noting that enforcing contact tracing through punishment was unlikely to be effective (or at least, not as effective as enforcing a lockdown). Holden rightly points out that contact tracing can also be increased through positive incentives:

The obvious way to would be to mandate its use. That’s how compulsory voting works. But Morrison has ruled that out.

As an economist, I should observe that another obvious (if less effective) means would be to provide incentives.

Joshua Gans and I advocated such an approach earlier this week.

People who install and use the app could, for example, be given a A$10 rebate on their monthly phone bill (a carrot). People who do not could be denied access to public places such as shopping centres and parks (a stick)...

The prime minister has suggested relaxing containment measures might be conditional on a certain take-up rate, suggesting another, complementary, approach – group incentives.

Imagine that any relaxation of current containment measures required a 40% take-up rate. There would be peer pressure to “do the right thing” for the whole community.

The higher the take-up, the safer it would be to lift additional restrictions.

Maybe pubs could open, with four-square-metre social distancing rules in place, if the take-up was 60%.

Perhaps with evidence of the virus remaining under control for an extended period, social-distancing measures could be relaxed further at an 80% to 90% take-up rate.

Would positive incentives work better than punishment? It's difficult to say with any certainty. However, while I like the suggestion of group incentives that Holden makes, maybe that just doubles down on the problems of conditional cooperation - if you think that you will miss out on the group incentive because not enough of the rest of the population is complying, then you will be much less likely to comply as well (and peer pressure be damned!).

Perhaps most effective would be a combination of carrot and stick? China has been using various apps to control movement of people - the apps track each person's status as being green (uninfected and free to move around), yellow (possibly infected, and restricted to home), and red (infected, and restricted to home). The app status is checked every time a person goes into or out of a building, etc. Of course, the main problem with such a system is the potential for it to worsen the digital divide - those without a smartphone (and hence, no ability to have the contact tracing app) are essentially excluded from anything that requires a green status. Perhaps then, we need government-issued smartphones?

Read more:

• The prisoners' dilemma, and why we all have to be kept in lockdown
• Coronavirus contact tracing and conditional cooperation