We study a planner's provision of information to manage workplace occupancy when strategic workers (agents) face risk of infectious disease transmission. The planner implements an information mechanism to signal information about the underlying risk of infection at the workplace. Agents update their belief over the risk parameter using this information and choose to work in-person or remotely. We address the design of the optimal signaling mechanism that best aligns the workplace occupancy with the planner's preference (i.e., maintaining safe capacity limits and operational efficiency at workplace). For various forms of planner preferences, we show numerical and analytical proof that interval-based information mechanisms are optimal. These mechanisms partition the continuous domain of the risk parameter into disjoint intervals and provision information based on interval-specific probability distributions over a finite set of signals. When the planner seeks to achieve an occupancy that lies in one of finitely many pre-specified ranges independent of the underlying risk, we provide an optimal mechanism that uses at most two intervals. On the other hand, when the preference on the occupancy is risk-dependent, we show that an approximately optimal interval-based mechanism can be computed efficiently. We bound the approximation loss for preferences that are expressed through a Lipschitz continuous function of both occupancy and risk parameter. We provide examples that demonstrate the improvement of proposed signaling mechanisms relative to the common benchmarks in information provision. Our findings suggest that information provision over the risk of disease transmission is an effective intervention for maintaining desirable occupancy levels at the workplace.

翻译：研究当战略型工人（代理人）面临传染病传播风险时，规划者如何通过信息管理来调控工作场所人员密度。规划者实施信息机制以传递工作场所潜在感染风险信号。代理人依据此信息更新对风险参数的认知，并选择线下办公或远程办公。我们探讨了最优信号机制的设计，该机制能最有效地使工作场所人员密度与规划者的偏好（即维持工作场所安全容量限制与运营效率）相契合。针对多种形式的规划者偏好，我们通过数值与理论证明表明，基于区间的信息机制具有最优性。此类机制将连续的风险参数域划分为不相交区间，并根据各区间特定的概率分布，通过有限信号集提供信息。当规划者试图在不受潜在风险影响的情况下，实现人员密度处于有限个预设区间之一时，我们提出了一种最多使用两个区间的最优机制。另一方面，当人员密度偏好与风险相关时，我们证明可高效计算出近似最优的区间化机制。我们通过风险与人员密度的Lipschitz连续函数刻画偏好，界定了近似损失。最后通过实例表明，所提信号机制相较于常见信息提供基准具有显著改进。研究结果表明，针对疾病传播风险的信息提供是维持工作场所理想人员密度的有效干预手段。