Aids: An Economic Approach to the Choice of Policies

This paper presents a novel approach to the difficult problem of society choosing the optimal set of policy instruments to control the spread of AIDS. The economic approach emphasizes the determinants of agents' behaviour and the reciprocal nature of the market failure problem. The nature of the social objective function is discussed and an expected‐utility‐maximizing model of the behaviour of HIV‐infectious agents is developed In the light of the agents' responses to government policies, some general principles relating to the ranking of instruments and their targeting of individual groups and of instrument variables are developed