The usual suspects: do risk tolerance, altruism, and health predict the response to COVID-19?
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The usual suspects: do risk tolerance, altruism, and health predict the response to COVID-19? Ketki Sheth1 Greg C. Wright1 ●
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Received: 15 June 2020 / Accepted: 6 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract We survey college students during California’s stay-at-home order to test whether compliance with social distancing requirements depends on primary preferences and characteristics that affect their marginal benefit from doing so. We find a quarter of students violated the order. Yet, neither risk preference, altruism, nor preexisting health conditions were predictive of compliance. Our findings raise doubt about the efficiency of minimally enforced social distancing policies, as well as commonly assumed motivations for compliance. Our results also imply that those with preexisting health conditions may not voluntarily comply, resulting in higher health care congestion than otherwise expected. Keywords COVID-19 Risk Altruism Health ●
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1 Introduction In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans are being encouraged – and in many states ordered – to socially distance and stay at home.1,2 Yet, there are concerns that many people have failed to comply and there has been pressure to relax requirements, both of which have important efficiency implications for these policies.3 This raises two key questions: to what extent are people not complying with orders to reduce social interaction? And what drives this non-compliance?
* Greg C. Wright [email protected] 1
1
University of California, Merced, CA, USA Since March 2020, 45 states have issued statewide orders to stay at home.
2
Social distancing is broadly defined as staying six feet away from others. Stay-at-home is generally a legal order for people to stay in their home, except for essential activities such as food, health care, and employment.
3
E.g., Murdoch (2020) and Behrmann (2020).
K. Sheth, G. C. Wright
Given the policy’s dual mandate to protect individuals from harm and reduce the transmission to others, this paper examines whether primary preferences and characteristics that align with these objectives are predictive of compliance. Specifically, whether preexisting health factors, risk aversion, and altruism predict staying at home and socially distancing. If individuals respond to the policy based on their own benefits from compliance, we should expect that those who are at greater risk of severe consequences from an infection, or more risk averse, will be more likely to comply. Likewise, those who are more altruistic should also have higher compliance because this reduces the likelihood of infecting others. Exploiting multiple surveys of California undergraduate students during a stay-athome order,4 we find that a quarter of our subjects violated the order for non-essential reasons. Yet neither preexisting health factors, risk aversion, nor altruism predicted compliance with social distancing guidelines. This is despite the fact that both existing health conditions and risk aver
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