Incentive Mechanism Design in Collaborative Management of Public Health Emergencies

Against the background of the worldwide spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, due to the lack of effective collaborative incentive mechanisms, issues of dislocation and incoordination have emerged in the public health emergency management system (PES) globally. Nevertheless, the available research rarely touches upon the incentive mechanism design for the collaborative management of PES. To alleviate these inefficiency operations problems with PES, three game-theoretical decision models, including a decentralized decision model without public governance policy incentive (GPI), a decentralized decision model with GPI, and a collaborative decision model with GPI, were developed and analyzed to explore and design the incentive mechanism of PES. Furthermore, the corresponding numerical and sensitivity analyses were conducted to validate the modelling results in the article. The research results show that: (1) the collaborative decision scenario with GPI performs best, and the decentralized decision scenario with GPI performs second-best regarding the equilibrium emergency management efforts (EMEs) and utilities in all the decision scenarios: (2) an incentive mechanism of the &ldquo:carrot + Stick&rdquo: can effectively enhance the collaborative management of public health emergencies and its governance-driven operational performance/efficiency: (3) strengthening the performance assessment of emergency management for relevant government departments is beneficial in improving the overall emergency management efficiency of the PES: (4) reducing the cost of EMEs and enhancing the effectiveness of EMEs are conducive to improving the overall emergency management efficiency of the PES. This research provides a novel framework for designing an effective incentive mechanism to overcome the incoordination impacts and achieve collaborative operations across the PES.