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Economics

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Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

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2020

Pandemic

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A Model Of Crisis Management, Fei Li, Jidong Zhou Dec 2020

A Model Of Crisis Management, Fei Li, Jidong Zhou

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We propose a model of how multiple societies respond to a common crisis. A government faces a “damned-either-way” policy-making dilemma: aggressive intervention contains the crisis, but the resulting good outcome makes people skeptical of the costly response; light intervention worsens the crisis and causes the government to be faulted for not doing enough. This dilemma can be mitigated for the society that encounters the crisis first if another society faces the same crisis afterward. Our model predicts that the later society does not necessarily perform better despite having more information, while the earlier society might benefit from a dynamic counterfactual …


A Model Of Sequential Crisis Management, Fei Li, Jidong Zhou Dec 2020

A Model Of Sequential Crisis Management, Fei Li, Jidong Zhou

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We propose a model of how multiple societies respond to a common crisis. A government faces a "damned-either-way" policymaking dilemma: aggressive intervention contains the crisis, but the resulting good outcome makes people skeptical about the costly response; light intervention worsens the crisis and causes the government to be faulted for not doing enough. When multiple societies encounter the crisis sequentially, due to this policymaking dilemma, late societies may underperform despite having more information, while early societies can benefit from a dynamic counterfactual effect.