COMPliaNCE: Computational approach that embeds Medical and Psychological research and develops normative Criteria for socio-economic policy Evaluation

Covid-19 has rapidly emerged as a novel risk for societies globally, creating the need for crafting adequate responses to limit its impact at the economic, financial, and societal levels. In particular, it is crucial to understand how the epidemiological dynamics (e.g., the spread of the virus, mortality) affect societies' psychological, ethical, and economic dimensions.

The COMPLIANCE project aims to study pandemics' complexity from an integrated multidisciplinary perspective by relying on economics, ethics, psychology, and virology research. More specifically, the project has four main objectives:

1.To develop an agent-based model and apply it to analyze the virological, social, and economic effects and the effectiveness of different policy interventions to fight epidemics such as the one caused by SARS-CoV-2. In particular, we focus on how the government can increase interventions' effectiveness through appropriate communication strategies. The model will be empirically validated with data from the Ruhr Area, Germany.

2.To study the psychological foundations of effective policy interventions. It is neither possible nor desirable in a democracy to implement the interventions only by force. Voluntary compliance with the mandated measures is crucial for their effectiveness. We hence explore when and why people comply with the restrictions to counter pandemics.

3.To study the virological foundations of effective policy interventions. In order to develop effective countermeasures, it is necessary to understand the incidence of active virus infections and the development of antibody responses. This knowledge is important to identify the recommended interventions from a medical perspective, identify vulnerable groups, and predict the course of the pandemic.

4.To study the ethical conflicts of goals during the pandemic. The ethical project's overall objective is to develop criteria for a well-founded moral evaluation of different policies and policy options concerning the corona pandemic. They are applied to the policy simulation scenarios.

The project will contribute to informed model-based policymaking by analyzing the possible consequences of alternative policy scenarios that will be developed and used to test the effectiveness of different policy mixes to tackle the pandemic and address economic recovery.