Covid-19 choice experiment research by TPM scientists published in PLOS ONE open access scientific journal

What is the best government response to the growing number of COVID-19 infections? This depends crucially on the weight society assigns to avoiding fatalities and long term health effects, but also on the weight attached to economic and other effects of restrictive measures.

With this notion in mind, TPM researchers Niek Mouter, Caspar Chorus and Swedish colleague Erlend Dancke Sandorf developed choice experiments to measure societal preferences for Covid-19 policies. Their study, published today in international scientific journal PLOS ONE, presents rigorous quantitative estimates of society's weights and of the trade-off between health effects and economic effects that is considered morally taboo by many. An international comparison is in the making. For now, the analyses can inform Dutch policy as they enable prediction of the acceptance of specific lockdown-measures in the population. Results have been shared with high-level policy makers already.

The data collection is sponsored by the TU Delft Covid-19 Response Fund. ERC supports this study as part of the BEHAVE programme which develops and tests moral decision making models. Read the article: ‘Diabolical dilemmas of COVID-19: An empirical study into Dutch society’s trade-offs between health impacts and other effects of the lockdown’.