Identification and Control of Game-Based Epidemic Models

Dario Madeo and Chiara Mocenni
Additional contact information
Dario Madeo: Department of Information Engineering and Mathematics, Via Roma, 56, 53100 Siena, Italy
Chiara Mocenni: Department of Information Engineering and Mathematics, Via Roma, 56, 53100 Siena, Italy

Games, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-20

Abstract: The effectiveness of control measures against the diffusion of the COVID-19 pandemic is grounded on the assumption that people are prepared and disposed to cooperate. From a strategic decision point of view, cooperation is the unreachable strategy of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, where the temptation to exploit the others and the fear of being betrayed by them drives the people’s behavior, which eventually results in a fully defective outcome. In this work, we integrate a standard epidemic model with the replicator equation of evolutionary games in order to study the interplay between the infection spreading and the propensity of people to be cooperative under the pressure of the epidemic. The developed model shows high performance in fitting real measurements of infected, recovered and dead people during the whole period of COVID-19 epidemic spread, from March 2020 to September 2021 in Italy. The estimated parameters related to cooperation result to be significantly correlated with vaccination and screening data, thus validating the model. The stability analysis of the multiple steady states present in the proposed model highlights the possibility to tune fundamental control parameters to dramatically reduce the number of potential dead people with respect to the non-controlled case.

Keywords: evolutionary games; epidemic containment; system identification; complex systems; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/13/1/10/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4336/13/1/10/ (text/html)

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:gam:jgames:v:13:y:2022:i:1:p:10-:d:721064

Access Statistics for this article

Games is currently edited by Ms. Susie Huang

More articles in Games from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().