Provisioning of Public Health Can Be Designed to Anticipate Public Policy Responses

Abstract

Public health policies can elicit strong responses from individuals. These responses can promote, reduce, and even reverse the expected benefits of the policies. Therefore, projections of individual responses to policy can be important ingredients in policy design. Yet our foresight of individual responses to public health investment remains limited. This paper formulates a population game describing the prevention of infectious disease transmission when community health depends on the interactions of individual and public investments. We compare three common relationships between public and individual investments and explain how each relationship alters policy responses and health outcomes. Our methods illustrate how identifying system interactions between nature and society can help us anticipate policy responses.

Keywords: Community health; Epidemiological games; Health commons; Infectious disease; Policy reinforcement; Policy resistance.