Abstract
The COVID 19 pandemic has caused an unprecedented health and economic crisis which was characterized by a rapid shortage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPEs). Over the last few decades, academics and practitioners have argued that ‘public health’ should be considered as a Global Public Good (GPG), with a particular emphasis on the control of infectious diseases. The provision of GPGs today—nationally and internationally—involves multiple authorities and actors of varying power at different jurisdictional levels. Strategic behavior and noncooperative and cooperative game theory plays a major role in the success or failure of GPG provision. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the PPEs shortage was alleviated by the involvement of the 3D Printing community which implemented several initiatives. Indeed, health care providers, 3D printing organisations, designers and engineers cooperated to supply PPEs. Software designers released their PPEs digital files, and by choosing freeware, they contributed to the production of the GPG. In this paper, we argue that the success of the 3D printing community in establishing a culture of shared knowledge and data to increase the supply of medical PPEs was made possible thanks to the availability of technology (including 3D Printing and scanning, Artificial Intelligence, and nanomedicine). A game theory model will be used to illustrate the cooperative strategic behaviour of various players involved in this process, and the lessons learned are instrumental for public health policies as well as for intellectual property laws.
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Notes
- 1.
A diagram that shows the different strategies that each player can follow in a game and the order in which those strategies get chosen.
- 2.
A plan of the actions that a player in a game will take under every conceivable circumstance that the player might face.
- 3.
The payoffs in the game are the amount that each player can expect to get under different combinations of strategy choices by the players.
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A procedure for solving a sequential-move game by starting at the end of the game tree and finding the optimal decision for the player at each decision point.
- 5.
Proposal 21–4307, submitted the 25 May 2021 to the Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights of the WTO, “WAIVER FROM CERTAIN PROVISIONS OF THE TRIPS AGREEMENT FOR THE PREVENTION, CONTAINMENT AND TREATMENT OF COVID-19”, at the request of the delega-tions of the African Group, the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Egypt, Eswatini, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Kenya, the LDC Group, Maldives, Mozambique, Mongolia, Na-mibia, Pakistan, South Africa, Vanuatu, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and Zimbabwe. Available online: https://docs.wto.org/dol2fe/Pages/SS/directdoc.aspx?filename=q:/IP/C/W669R1.pdf&Open=True.
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Antoun-Nakhle, R., Haidar, R., Hariri, N. (2022). 3D Printing During the Covid-19 Pandemic in Lebanon. In: Bach Tobji, M.A., Jallouli, R., Strat, V.A., Soares, A.M., Davidescu, A.A. (eds) Digital Economy. Emerging Technologies and Business Innovation. ICDEc 2022. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 461. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17037-9_3
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