Epidemics, vaccines, and health policy

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• Author: Rabah Amir,Raouf Boucekkine
• Date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jpet.12677

DOI: 10.1111/jpet.12677

INTRODUCTION

Epidemics, vaccines, and health policy

This Special Issue of Journal of Public Economic Theory is a follow‐up on Issue 24‐5 (for a

summary of its contributions, see Amir & Boucekkine, 2022), both issues being dedicated to the

economics of epidemics, vaccines, and associated health policies. The present special issue

includes seven original and carefully selected articles, some of which are pioneering within the

recent COVID‐19‐induced, epidemics‐related economics literature.

The seven articles may be divided along the broad categorization by area of economics: five

of them take a microeconomics perspective (Amir, et al., 2023; Higgins & Sabarwal, 2023;

d'Albis, et al., 2023; Samad et al., 2023; Sorensen, 2023) and thus join similar studies published

in the previous Special Issue (e.g., Azémar et al., 2022). The other two articles are grounded in a

macroeconomic overlapping‐generations framework (Davin et al., 2023; Marchiori &

Pierrard, 2023).

The economics of vaccines is a recurrent theme in this Special Issue and the articles by

d'Albis et al. (2023), Sorensen (2023), and Amir et al. (2023) all address, directly or indirectly,

different facets of this important issue. More specifically, all three articles propose settings and

results that shed light on some rational or positive aspects of the key issue of vaccine hesitancy,

which was one of the central and enduring challenges faced by national and international

health authorities during the recent COVID‐19 crisis (also see Federico et al., 2022).

We outline in what follows the specific contributions of each of the papers contained in the

present Special Issue, stressing their value‐added.

The article by Higgins and Sabarwal (2023) fits in the recent literature strand of games on

networks, a setting used to understand strategic diffusion of actions or ideas, among other

issues. Specifically, the authors study the scope for the proliferation of an action (such as a

political narrative or a reaction to a health campaign on online social media) in binary‐action

network coordination games that include both local and global effects (with the latter included

as an additive component to a player's payoff). This provides a theoretical basis to understand

the success or failure of particular messages and their impact on societal outcomes. The setting

naturally captures complementarities among starting sets, network resilience, and global effects

and highlights the interdependence of channels through which such contagion spreads.

The authors present new, natural, computationally tractable, and efficient algorithms to

define and compute equilibrium objects that facilitate the general study of contagion in

networks and prove their theoretical properties. The algorithms are easy to implement and help

to quantify relationships previously inaccessible due to computational intractability. Using

these algorithms, we study the spread of contagion in scale‐free networks with 1000 players

using millions of Monte Carlo simulations. Overall, this analysis provides quantitative and

qualitative insight into the design of policies to control or spread contagion in networks. The

scope of application is enlarged given the many other situations in different fields (e.g.,

epidemiology, political science and sociology) that may be modeled using this framework (see

Freiberger et al., 2022).

Vaccine hesitancy is a major challenge with the potential to undermine the efficacy of

health and epidemic control policies, as has been made clear in the recent COVID crisis.

J Public Econ Theory. 2023;25:1143–1148. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jpet © 2023 Wiley Periodicals LLC.

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