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Contacts, altruism and competing externalities

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

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Abstract

This paper considers voluntary transmissive contacts between partially altruistic individuals in the presence of asymptomatic infection. Two different types of externalities from contacts are considered, infection externalities and socioeconomic externalities. When contacts are incidental, then externalities work through disease propagation. When contacts are essential, both infection and socioeconomic externalities are present. It is shown that for incidental contacts, equilibrium involves suboptimally high exposure whereas for essential contacts, equilibrium exposure is suboptimally low. An increase in altruism may thus increase or decrease disease transmission, depending on the type of contact under consideration. The analysis implies that policy to manage an epidemic should differentiate between different types of transmissive activities.

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Keywords

38 Economics, 3803 Economic Theory

Journal Title

European Economic Review

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0014-2921
1873-572X

Volume Title

Publisher

Elsevier BV