Policy choices and compliance behavior in pandemic times

Abstract

In this paper, we model an evolutionary noncooperative game between politicians and citizens that, given the level of infection, describes the observed variety of mitigation policies and citizens’ compliance during the COVID-19 pandemic period. Our results show that different stable equilibria exist and that different ways/paths exist to reach these equilibria may be present, depending on the choice of parameters. When the parameters are chosen opportunistically, in the short run, our model generates transitions between hard and soft policy measures to deal with the pandemic. In the long-run, convergence is achieved toward one of the possible stable steady states (obey or not obey lockdown rules) as functions of politicians’ and citizens’ incentives.