The Corona-Pandemic: A Game-Theoretic Perspective on Regional and Global Governance
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We argue that the incentive structure of all individual and coordinated measures across countries to contain the corona-pandemic is that of a weakest-link public good game. We discuss a selection of theoretical and experimental key results of weakest-link games and interpret them in the light of the corona-pandemic. First, we highlight that experimental evidence does not support the assumption that coordination can be trivially solved, even among symmetric players. Second, we argue that for asymmetric countries the weakest-link game does not only pose a problem of coordination, but also a problem of cooperation. Third, we show how and under which conditions self-enforcing treaties can foster coordination and cooperation. We account for the possibility that countries make mistakes when choosing their actions. Our discussion shows that North–South cooperation is relevant and likely to be self-enforcing and that regional cooperation, e.g., within the EU, will also be important.
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The outcome of a weakest-link game depends on the weakest links among national governments.
“Such a strategic situation is known as a weakest-link game, because the outcome—in this case the chance of a suppression solution—depends on the weakest links among the national governments.35, 36, 37”
From The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic (2022) · cites this paper as [36]
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
The Lancet Commission on lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic
Sachs, J. D., Karim, S. S. A., Aknin, L., Allen, J., Brosbøl, K., Colombo, F., Barron, G. C., Espinosa, M. F., Gaspar, V., Gaviria, A., et al. (2022) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(22)01585-9 · Cited by 842 · see citing works
- Authors
- Caparrós, A., & Finus, M.
- Affiliations
- Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (ES)
- University of Graz (AT)
- Corresponding author
- Finus, Michael
- Venue
- Environmental and Resource Economics
- Published
- 2020-08
- Volume
- 76
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 913-927
- ISSN
- 0924-6460 (ISSN-L)
- 1573-1502
- PMC
- PMC7399618
- OpenAlex
- W3047462758
- Cited by
- 26
- References
- 22
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 2
- FWCI
- 6.12
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- Environmental and Resource Economics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Unipub UB Graz (Universität Graz) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- University of Bath (VB-EC3BMF)
- Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (TrenGood, ECO2017-84461-R)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Game Theory and Applications
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Climate Change Policy and Economics
- Keywords
- COVID-19 pandemic, international coordination, global governance, regional governance, asymmetric players, North-South cooperation, EU cooperation, public goods, experimental economics
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