ArticleFrontiers in psychology2020
On the Value of Alert Systems and Gentle Rule Enforcement in Addressing Pandemics.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Factors Influencing the Adoption of Contact Tracing Applications: Systematic Review and Recommendations.Frontiers in digital health · 2022Pooled it
- Public attitudes toward COVID-19 misbehaviors: Perceived seriousness of the misbehavior and perceived severity of the appropriate punishment.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Frequency of enforcement is more important than the severity of punishment in reducing violation behaviors.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic poses a major challenge to policy makers on how to encourage compliance to social distancing and personal protection rules. This paper compares the effectiveness of two policies that aim to increase the frequency of responsible health behavior using smartphone-tracking applications. The first involves enhanced alert capabilities, which remove social externalities and protect the users from others' reckless behavior. The second adds a rule enforcement mechanism that reduces the users' benefit from reckless behavior. Both strategies should be effective if agents are expected-value maximizers, risk averse, and behave in accordance with cumulative prospect theory (Tversky and Kahneman, 1992) or in accordance with the Cognitive Hierarchy model (Camerer et al., 2004). A multi-player trust-game experiment was designed to compare the effectiveness of the two policies. The results reveal a substantial advantage to the enforcement application, even one with occasional misses. The enhanced-alert strategy was completely ineffective. The findings align with the small samples hypothesis, suggesting that decision makers tend to select the options that lead to the best payoff in a small sample of similar past experiences. In the current context, the tendency to rely on a small sample appears to be more consequential than other deviations from rational choice.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.