After testing positive for COVID-19 over the weekend and our discussion of the prisoner's dilemma in class today, I started to think about how these two subjects actually connect quite well. COVID-19 has affected almost the whole world and the race is on for which country will be the first to successfully introduce a safe vaccine, but herein lies the "real-life prisoner's dilemma."
To date, the US, Europe and China have led the pack, investing the most into developing a vaccine, but their willingness to share and take collective action is lacking, one may argue. Each country has a dominant strategy: not to cooperate or combine with one another. It is in each country's best interest to develop and manufacture their own vaccine and distribute it to their citizens as quickly as possible, without wasting time, money and effort on getting the vaccine to other nations. Countries do not want to share their contributions with others in fear they may not get any benefit/contributions in return; they want to protect their own people first and maximize their profit and prestige. Unfortunately, this strategy comes at a greater cost to the rest of the world. If countries were to coordinate efforts, a vaccine could safely reach all people around the world at a faster rate, resulting in an allocatively efficient outcome. Once successfully approved, a COVID-19 vaccine should be a public good. By countries not taking collective action on the development, manufacturing, and distribution of the vaccine, the world is settling on an allocatively inefficient outcome of a public good: Q will be less than Qae.
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