  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.
