[JustAnotherFan]

This is a bit old but I thought it was an interesting idea, from https://freakonomics.com/podcast/covid-19-reopen/

LEVITT: Well, I think the answer is: you’ve got to make it worth people’s while to take this test. It’s what economists call “internalizing the externality.” So we’re going to need a lot of apparently healthy people, people without symptoms, to take this test. So I think we should pay them, and a sensible way to do that might be in the form of a really big lottery. So you might even call it, like, Pandemillions, or something like that. So you could imagine we could put something like $500 million, $1 billion a week into this lottery. And in order to get a lottery ticket, you’d have to go and get tested for Covid. And the social benefit would so swamp the costs of doing this. A billion dollars a week or something, it’s peanuts compared to even the existing CARES Act and almost vanishingly small compared to the costs overall of this disease.

DUBNER: What’s the difference if you test positive or negative, though? Do you get more chances at the lottery if you test positive because we want to incentivize people then to stay home for an additional two weeks or whatnot?

LEVITT: So I think if you test positive, it maybe gets simpler because you’re talking about a smaller group of people. I would simply just pay people to stay at home. I would pay a big enough number that even if you don’t feel sick, you’d want to stay home. So if something like, I don’t know, $2,000 per week, and you get paid that as long as you’re testing positive. I would pay handsomely for people to stay at home. I really think if the incentive plans that I’m pushing get put into place, our problem will not be getting people to stay home or to take the test. Our problem will be that people are going to cheat like crazy to try to get certain results and get into the lottery and whatnot. I’d much rather have the problem of people too eager to get tested and faking Covid than the problem we have, which is a pandemic in which people are out and about doing things and we don’t know how to stop it.

This is risky. Some prior research has shown that incentives can sometimes backfire, such as when it comes to doing things for the good of others. 

https://hbr.org/2009/03/when-economic-in...s-backfire

[JustAnotherFan]

This is a bit old but I thought it was an interesting idea, from https://freakonomics.com/podcast/covid-19-reopen/

LEVITT: Well, I think the answer is: you’ve got to make it worth people’s while to take this test. It’s what economists call “internalizing the externality.” So we’re going to need a lot of apparently healthy people, people without symptoms, to take this test. So I think we should pay them, and a sensible way to do that might be in the form of a really big lottery. So you might even call it, like, Pandemillions, or something like that. So you could imagine we could put something like $500 million, $1 billion a week into this lottery. And in order to get a lottery ticket, you’d have to go and get tested for Covid. And the social benefit would so swamp the costs of doing this. A billion dollars a week or something, it’s peanuts compared to even the existing CARES Act and almost vanishingly small compared to the costs overall of this disease.

DUBNER: What’s the difference if you test positive or negative, though? Do you get more chances at the lottery if you test positive because we want to incentivize people then to stay home for an additional two weeks or whatnot?

LEVITT: So I think if you test positive, it maybe gets simpler because you’re talking about a smaller group of people. I would simply just pay people to stay at home. I would pay a big enough number that even if you don’t feel sick, you’d want to stay home. So if something like, I don’t know, $2,000 per week, and you get paid that as long as you’re testing positive. I would pay handsomely for people to stay at home. I really think if the incentive plans that I’m pushing get put into place, our problem will not be getting people to stay home or to take the test. Our problem will be that people are going to cheat like crazy to try to get certain results and get into the lottery and whatnot. I’d much rather have the problem of people too eager to get tested and faking Covid than the problem we have, which is a pandemic in which people are out and about doing things and we don’t know how to stop it.

This is risky. Some prior research has shown that incentives can sometimes backfire, such as when it comes to doing things for the good of others. 

https://hbr.org/2009/03/when-economic-in...s-backfire