I’ve also seen a couple of variations on risk budgets in group houses, along the lines of: the house has a total risk budget, and then distributes that budget among its members (and maybe gives them some way to trade). In the case where the house has at least one risk-discussion-hater in it, this might make sense; but if everybody is an enthusiastic cost/benefit analyzer, I strongly suspect that it’s optimal to ditch the budget, figure out how many housemates will get sick if a single person gets sick (e.g. if housemate-to-housemate transmission is 30%, then in a 3-person household, one sick person will get an average of about 0.60 housemates sick), and use that to institute a Pigouvian tax on microCOVIDs, exactly as in the “enthusiastic optimizer” example.
Pedantic note: if housemate-to-housemate transmission is 30%, then there’s a 30% chance that you infect each of your two housemates, which indeed gives 0.6 sick housemates—but in the case where you infected exactly one of them (0.42 of the time) there’s then a 30% chance that they infect the other one after all, giving an extra 0.126 sick housemates for a total of 0.726.
(Well, maybe. Perhaps that 30% figure is partly because some people are just harder to infect, so that conditional on your having infected A but not B, B is then less likely to get it from A.)
IIRC, covid risk budgets arose in a group housing context—the idea was that it was an equitable way to balance the risk that your activities were presenting to your housemates, and to prevent the more risk-loving housemates from unfairly exposing risk-averse housemates to undue dangers.
If you’re not concerned about the risk to people close to you, or if they’re defectors who are doing whatever they want anyway, then a covid risk budget makes less sense, and OP’s cost-benefit analysis makes more sense. Of course, as pointed out upthread, if you don’t trust yourself to make reasonable long-term decisions in the moment, then committing to a budget is a pretty good way of lowering overall risk.
I’ve also seen a couple of variations on risk budgets in group houses, along the lines of: the house has a total risk budget, and then distributes that budget among its members (and maybe gives them some way to trade). In the case where the house has at least one risk-discussion-hater in it, this might make sense; but if everybody is an enthusiastic cost/benefit analyzer, I strongly suspect that it’s optimal to ditch the budget, figure out how many housemates will get sick if a single person gets sick (e.g. if housemate-to-housemate transmission is 30%, then in a 3-person household, one sick person will get an average of about 0.60 housemates sick), and use that to institute a Pigouvian tax on microCOVIDs, exactly as in the “enthusiastic optimizer” example.
Pedantic note: if housemate-to-housemate transmission is 30%, then there’s a 30% chance that you infect each of your two housemates, which indeed gives 0.6 sick housemates—but in the case where you infected exactly one of them (0.42 of the time) there’s then a 30% chance that they infect the other one after all, giving an extra 0.126 sick housemates for a total of 0.726.
(Well, maybe. Perhaps that 30% figure is partly because some people are just harder to infect, so that conditional on your having infected A but not B, B is then less likely to get it from A.)
Pedantry appreciated; you are quite right!
I was planning to say this too.
IIRC, covid risk budgets arose in a group housing context—the idea was that it was an equitable way to balance the risk that your activities were presenting to your housemates, and to prevent the more risk-loving housemates from unfairly exposing risk-averse housemates to undue dangers.
If you’re not concerned about the risk to people close to you, or if they’re defectors who are doing whatever they want anyway, then a covid risk budget makes less sense, and OP’s cost-benefit analysis makes more sense. Of course, as pointed out upthread, if you don’t trust yourself to make reasonable long-term decisions in the moment, then committing to a budget is a pretty good way of lowering overall risk.