Learning to Mitigate Epidemic Risks: A Dynamic Population Game Approach

Ashish R. Hota (), Urmee Maitra (), Ezzat Elokda () and Saverio Bolognani ()
Additional contact information
Ashish R. Hota: IIT Kharagpur
Urmee Maitra: IIT Kharagpur
Ezzat Elokda: ETH Zürich
Saverio Bolognani: ETH Zürich

Dynamic Games and Applications, 2023, vol. 13, issue 4, No 5, 1106-1129

Abstract: Abstract We present a dynamic population game model to capture the behavior of a large population of individuals in presence of an infectious disease or epidemic. Individuals can be in one of five possible infection states at any given time: susceptible, asymptomatic, symptomatic, recovered and unknowingly recovered, and choose whether to opt for vaccination, testing or social activity with a certain degree. We define the evolution of the proportion of agents in each epidemic state, and the notion of best response for agents that maximize long-run discounted expected reward as a function of the current state and policy. We further show the existence of a stationary Nash equilibrium and explore the transient evolution of the disease states and individual behavior under a class of evolutionary learning dynamics. Our results provide compelling insights into how individuals evaluate the trade-off among vaccination, testing and social activity under different parameter regimes, and the impact of different intervention strategies (such as restrictions on social activity) on vaccination and infection prevalence.

Keywords: Dynamic population game; Epidemic mitigation; Vaccination; Testing; Perturbed best response dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s13235-023-00529-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:dyngam:v:13:y:2023:i:4:d:10.1007_s13235-023-00529-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13235

DOI: 10.1007/s13235-023-00529-4

Access Statistics for this article

Dynamic Games and Applications is currently edited by Georges Zaccour

More articles in Dynamic Games and Applications from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().