Corona Games: Masks, Social Distancing and Mechanism Design

Pandemic response is a complex affair. Most governments employ a set of quasi-standard measures to fight COVID-19 including wearing masks, social distancing, virus testing and contact tracing. We argue that some non-trivial factors behind the varying effectiveness of these measures are selfish decision-making and the differing national implementations of the response mechanism. In this paper, through simple games, we show the effect of individual incentives on the decisions made with respect to wearing masks and social distancing, and how these may result in a sub-optimal outcome. We also demonstrate the responsibility of national authorities in designing these games properly regarding the chosen policies and their influence on the preferred outcome. We promote a mechanism design approach: it is in the best interest of every government to carefully balance social good and response costs when implementing their respective pandemic response mechanism.