Infection Transmission Footprint – A Behavioural Economics Nudge to Steer Policy in the Face of the Pandemic

A TPF Lecture on “Infection Transmission Footprint – A Behavioural Economics Nudge to Steer Policy in the Face of the Pandemic” by our Distinguished Speaker – Dr. Jeyakar Vedamanickam, Senior Fellow, The Peninsula Foundation.

Concept Note:

The asymmetry of the human mind in treating the information that is currently available and the information we do not have is remarkable. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many people have been conscious to take precautions to prevent contracting the virus oneself or their family members. However, the consequences of a person infecting another are not consciously considered by everyone while going on about their ‘new normal’ life making daily transactions that involve the labour of a multitude of people. Nobody pauses to wonder whether anyone in the supply chain of the product or service consumed by an individual has contracted the virus or died due to the virus in the process of its production. This is because that information is unavailable to us in a tangible form for our minds to perceive and hence it chooses to ignore it. Although the number of cases increases with every wave, people have started accepting it or rather have become desensitised to the number of lives lost to Covid-19, mainly because these deaths are unseen. This event explores whether such pondering – the number of people infected and consequently lives compromised – would be a consideration in the decision-making in the production and consumption of products and services. If so, is there a need to develop a metric to inform us of this number? Would it be feasible to have such a metric? This event attempts to quantify these unseen deaths, so as to sensitise people to the consequences of a person getting infected.

About the Distinguished Speaker:

Dr. Jeyakar Vedamanickam is a Senior Fellow at The Peninsula Foundation. He joined Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. as a Management Trainee. In his later career, he shouldered responsibilities in HAL as GM – Aerospace Division (during ISRO’s launch of Mars Orbiter in 2013) and GM (Export Marketing). He was also the Director of XIME (Xavier Institute of Management and Entrepreneurship – Bangalore) and CEO of IRAL (Indo Russian Aviation Ltd., a joint venture company between HAL, ICICI, The Joint Stock Company RAC-MiG, and another two Russian companies). His current interests are in the emerging discipline of Behavioural Economics, and he applies ideas from this discipline to deliver corporate workshops on ‘Noise in Decision Making and Judgement‘, ‘Strategic Management’, ‘Risk Management’, and ‘Creativity and Innovation’. He is a life member of the Society for Professional Ethics and Management and Mensa – India. He has authored the book ‘Sculpting Angels: Parenting Lessons to Foster Creativity in Children’, in yet another domain among his interests.