Social distancing under strategic uncertainty: The role of strategic sophistication in the COVID-19 pandemic

This study examines how individuals’ strategic sophistication shapes social distancing during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, when distancing was a costly protective decision under two sources of risk: the private risk of infection and strategic uncertainty about whether others would comply. We develop a weakest-link public goods game with private costs of social distancing, in which agents differ in their level- k depth of reasoning about others. The model predicts that the probability of distancing rises with the level- k type when baseline compliance is low. We test this prediction using large-scale, nationally representative survey data that include incentivized experiments to measure participants’ level- k types. We find that a one-level increase in level- k lowers the probability of leaving home daily by 1.6 percentage points in Singapore and is associated with a 3.4 percentage-point lower probability of maintaining or increasing outdoor activity in South Korea.