Social distancing as a public good

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the need for collective action to preserve community health. Social distancing can be defined as a public good since it is non-rival, one agent participating does not diminish another agent’s capacity to participate or enjoy the benefits of a population free of COVID-19, and non-excludable, no agent can be excluded from participating or enjoying these benefits (Mellacher 2020, 2). COVID-19 has seen the development of a new public goods game relying heavily on voluntary compliance. As defined by Mellacher (2020, 3), a “public goods game is a situation in which players have the option to contribute to such a good, where the individual costs of contribution exceed its individual benefits, but are at the same time lower than the sum of the benefits to all players”. Applying this to the macro phenomena of social distancing, every agent has the ability to participate (irrelevant of whether it is convenient), but at a high cost, as it requires them to forgo activities such as large gatherings, being comfortable taking public transport, or visiting public spaces. However, if everyone is compliant, the benefits are that of an exponential feedback loop; the transmission rate reduces, the burden on healthcare reduces, and with less people infected, the transmission rate reduces further and so forth.

Widespread collective action

There are various factors that increase cooperation in immediate widespread collective action. Actors in a collective action problem will generally cooperate if other agents also cooperate (“conditional cooperation”) (Harring, Sverker, et al. 2020, 2). This may be because social influence pressures individuals to adhere to health guidelines, in this case social distancing, for fear of having divergent beliefs and actions to the collective or due to the exacerbated fear of the virus presented by the collective (Moussaid, Kammer, et al. 2013, 1). These social sanctions in the form of peer pressure, shame, criticism or exclusion, alongside legal enforcement such as fines, encourages individuals to abide by the (present-day) social norm of social distancing (Cato, Iida, et al. 2020, 52). However, as with all public goods games, there is an opportunity to free-ride, particularly due to the ‘voluntary’ nature of social distancing comparative to state-wide imposed lockdowns. In this case, since citizens cannot be excluded from living in an environment free from COVID-19, it may result in a subsequent outcome where a certain amount of agents enjoy a virus-free environment without respecting safety practices in the short term, long term causing a significant spike in the reinfection rate (Naso 2020, 72).

Further, collective action in relation to less intrusive “light-touch” policies, such as social distancing, becomes heavily reliant on reciprocal trust, where citizens “must trust that the recommendations they receive from the public authorities are correct, that these are in their (or the collective’s) best interest”, and governments must trust citizens to comply with recommendations (Harring, Sverker, et al. 2020, 3). For this collective action to create a tangible change, the “cumulative contribution” of all agents must be greater than a certain threshold in order to receive benefits, meaning there must be enough participation in social distancing for a “measurable ‘flattening’ in cases” to occur (Sandler 2020, 6). This measurability will presumably further increase compliance with the guidance of public health authorities, hence increasing institutional trust.

Social distancing and widespread collective action: in practice

It is integral to acknowledge that countries have not been equally burdened by strains of the virus (Abdalla, Maani, et al. 2020, 1). Naturally, countries that have better managed the COVD-19 situation are those that have made it easier to comply with public health guidelines. In more vulnerable geographical areas, such as in the Arab states, workers have had to continue working in a collapsing labour market without infrastructure to support work-from-home (International Labour Organisation 2020). As such, they are required to catch public transport to attend said jobs, negatively affecting the likelihood of voluntary social distancing (Pejo, and Biczok 2020, 1). As noted by Hattke and Martin (2020, 615), “individual rationality does not necessarily result in collectively rational outcomes”, or in the case of social distancing, when everyone follows the rules there is widespread benefit, though individuals are highly incentivised to deviate. Players in the public goods game use variables such as the economic and social costs of staying home, benefit of going out, probability of infection and mortality rate as parameters that guide the likelihood of deviation from guidelines (Pejo, and Biczok 2020, 7). Moreover, as the time of participation required by agents increases (length of pandemic), compliance decreases, as the economic and social costs for players further rise (Mellacher 2020, 4). In the present case, deviation is almost necessitated — the alternate option being starvation or homelessness.

Comparatively, privileged economies such as Australia, which already have smaller and less-dense populations, have been able to utilise coordinated monetary and fiscal supplements to relieve the strain on unemployed or underemployed workers. Moreover, government sanctions (such as fines), coupled with the perceived risk of police detection being high, and the government’s appeal to a sense of duty and altruism, increases compliance rates (Murphy, Williamson, et al. 2020, 479). As such, the relative incentive to deviate is minimal, hence increasing cooperation with the provision of social distancing as a public good.

Conclusion

Ultimately, social distancing in the COVID-19 pandemic can be analysed as a public goods game, with higher economic and social costs for agents reducing the likelihood of voluntary compliance. Collective action has been promoted by the immediate and tangible fear of the virus, social pressure and reciprocal trust by governments. It can be concluded that the free-rider problem (i.e. non-compliance with social distancing) has posed a larger challenge to nation-states where deviation from engaging in public health measures is highly incentivised or even necessitated. As such, by engaging with additional policies (such as improved monetary and fiscal support) modelling those of successful economies, central governments can reduce the incentive to deviate and hence increase voluntary compliance, resulting in a positive feedback loop of lowered infection rates.

Works Cited

Abdalla, Salma M., Nason Maani, Catherine K. Ettman, and Sandro Galea. 2020. “Claiming Health as a Public Good in the Post‑COVID‑19 Era.” Development, 63 (December): 200–204. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41301-020-00255-z

Cato, Susumu, Takashi Iida, Kenji Ishida, Asei Ito, Kenneth Mori McElwain, and Masahiro Shoji. 2020. “Social distancing as a public good under the COVID-19 pandemic.” Public health 188 (November): 51–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2020.08.005

Harring, Niklas, Sverker C. Jagers, and Åsa Löfgren. 2021. “COVID-19: Large-scale collective action, government intervention, and the importance of trust.” World Development 138 (February): 105236. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105236

Hattke, Fabian, and Helge Martin. “Collective action during the Covid-19 pandemic: The case of Germany’s fragmented authority.” Administrative Theory & Praxis 42, no. 4 (October): 614–632.

International Labour Organisation. 2020. “Vulnerable workers hardest hit by COVID-19 fallout in fragile Arab states.” Press release published 13 October, 2020. https://www.ilo.org/beirut/media-centre/news/WCMS_757979/lang--en/index.htm

Mellacher, P. 2020. “Cooperation in the Age of COVID-19: Evidence from Public Goods Games.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.09189: 1–8.

Moussaïd, Mehdi, Juliane E. Kämmer, Pantelis P. Analytis, and Hansjörg Neth. 2013. “Social influence and the collective dynamics of opinion formation.” PloS one 8, no. 11 (November): e78433. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0078433

Murphy, Kristina, Harley Williamson, Elise Sargeant, and Molly McCarthy. 2020. “Why People Comply with COVID-19 Social Distancing Restrictions: Self-Interest or Duty?” Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 53, no. 4 (December): 477–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/0004865820954484.

Naso, Ronald C. 2020. “Covid-19 and the free-rider problem.” Journal of Psychology and Clinical Psychiatry 11, no. 3 (June): 72. https://doi.org/10.15406/jpcpy.2020.11.00674

Pejó, Balázs, and Gergely Biczók. 2020. “Corona Games: Masks, Social Distancing and Mechanism Design.” In Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Modeling and Understanding the Spread of COVID-19, 24–31. New York: Association for Computing Machinery.

Sandler, Todd. 2020. “COVID-19 and Collective Action.” Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy 26, no. 3 (July): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1515/peps-2020-0023