On the 8th of November, Marc Leandri will present his research during the EEU seminar. He is currently an assitant professor at CEMOTEV - Université Versailles Saint Quentin. Marc will give a talk with the topic "ticks economics".
Marc will present his research related to the prevention of Lyme disease.
Abstract
Lyme disease is a vector-borne disease with potential long-term effects transmitted to humans by infected tick bite. Since the prevalence of ticks in European forests is trending up under the effects of climate change, the risk of a bite during a forest recreational activity is increasing and raises public health concerns, despite the heated debates on the actual severity of Lyme disease. Since the decision of forest users to engage in self-protection efforts is largely influenced by their information biases, we explore the relevance of information instruments such as local nudges and global beliefs alteration for an efficient prevention policy. To do so we build a theoretical model where individuals with heterogeneous perceptions on both the risk of a bite and the severity of the disease determine their optimal self-protection effort while the social planner resorts to local and national scale information instruments to reduce the welfare loss due to imperfect information. Our work, backed up by a parallel empirical study for parameter calibration, sheds some light on the crucial role of perception and imperfect information in the spreading of vectorial diseases.