Managing Contagion: COVID-19, public health, and reflexive behavior

This paper characterizes a pandemic as a kind of contagion, and describes acontagion as a two-level, two-direction, reflexive feedback loop system. In such a system,expert opinions for managing a pandemic can act as self-fulfilling prophecies due to howthey influence collective belief formation. However, when multiple experts produce multipleexpert opinions that act as self-fulfilling prophecies, this can fragment a society’s response toa pandemic, worsening rather than ameliorating it. This paper models this possible outcomeby distinguishing two competing expert opinions, appealing respectively to people in clubgood and common pool types of employment/health insurance situations, and argues that to combat fragmentation of opinion about how to address a pandemic, public health policyneeds to attend to the nature of public reasoning. It argues this entails asking how just andlegitimate deliberative institutions can function in an ‘inclusive and noncoercive’ way thatallows society to reconcile competing visions regarding how to combat system-wide crisessuch as pandemics. JEL Classification: A13; H41; H70; I100.