Hellmann Thomas, Thiele Veikko
Saïd Business School University of Oxford Oxford UK.
Smith School of Business Queen's University Kingston Ontario Canada.
J Public Econ Theory. 2022 Apr 7. doi: 10.1111/jpet.12584.
Beyond Covid-19, there is a growing interest in what economic structures will be needed to face ongoing pandemics. In this paper, we focus on the diagnostic problem and examine a new paradigm of voluntary self-testing by private individuals. We develop a dynamic model where individuals without symptoms face daily choices of either taking the risk of going out (to work and socialize), staying at home in self-isolation, or using a test to verify whether they are infected before going out. Our central insight is that the equilibrium public infection risk falls when home-based testing becomes cheaper and easier to use, even if they generate both false-positive (type I error) and false-negative (type II error) test outcomes. We also show that the presence of naïve individuals actually reduces the equilibrium infection risk in the economy. Overall our model shows that, even if inaccurate, home-based tests are vital for an economy facing an ongoing pandemic.
除了新冠疫情，人们越来越关注应对持续流行疾病所需的经济结构。在本文中，我们聚焦于诊断问题，并研究个人自愿自我检测的新范式。我们构建了一个动态模型，在该模型中，无症状个体每天面临着三种选择：冒险外出（工作和社交）、居家自我隔离，或者在外出前使用检测手段来验证自己是否感染。我们的核心观点是，即使家用检测会产生假阳性（I型错误）和假阴性（II型错误）的检测结果，但当家用检测变得更便宜且更易于使用时，均衡状态下的公共感染风险会降低。我们还表明，天真个体的存在实际上降低了经济中的均衡感染风险。总体而言，我们的模型表明，即使不准确，家用检测对于面临持续大流行的经济体来说至关重要。
