Game Theory of Social Distancing in Response to an Epidemic

By Timothy C. Reluga. PLoS Comput. Biol., 2010

484 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social distancing practices are changes in behavior that prevent disease transmission by reducing contact rates between susceptible individuals and infected individuals who may transmit the disease. Social distancing practices can reduce the severity of an epidemic, but the benefits of social distancing depend on the extent to which it is used by individuals. Individuals are sometimes reluctant to pay the costs inherent in social distancing, and this can limit its effectiveness as a control measure. This paper formulates a differential-game to identify how individuals would best use social distancing and related self-protective behaviors during an epidemic. The epidemic is described by a simple, well-mixed ordinary differential equation model. We use the differential game to study potential value of social distancing as a mitigation measure by calculating the equilibrium behaviors under a variety of cost-functions. Numerical methods are used to calculate the total costs of an epidemic under equilibrium behaviors as a function of the time to mass vaccination, following epidemic identification. The key parameters in the analysis are the basic reproduction number and the baseline efficiency of social distancing. The results show that social distancing is most beneficial to individuals for basic reproduction numbers around 2. In the absence of vaccination or other intervention measures, optimal social distancing never recovers more than 30% of the cost of infection. We also show how the window of opportunity for vaccine development lengthens as the efficiency of social distancing and detection improve.

Subfields: Genetics, Modeling and Simulation, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e479f017c046b08281714055ebc1b685dfcadf92

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Citations in the corpus

Risk perceptions of COVID-19 around the world (2020, background): “In fact, collectively, people’s behavior can fundamentally influence and alter the spread of a pandemic (Epstein et al. 2008; Funk et al. 2009; Reluga 2010; Van Bavel et al. 2020).”
Equilibrium Social Distancing (2020, background): “Reluga (2010) analyzes a differential game model of social distancing with a finite horizon, no discounting and (eventual) vaccination.”
Statistical physics of vaccination (2016, background): “4, apart from vaccination, there might also exist non-pharmaceutical interventions that may help mitigate the risks and seem of particular importance before effective vaccines are widely available [52, 54, 59, 412, 503, 589, 590].”
Social Media Adoption in SMEs Impacted by COVID-19: The TOE Model (2020, background): “Social distancing, according to Reluga (2010), is an aspect of human behavior to reduce the level of contact with others to reduce the transmission of diseases.”
Coupled disease–behavior dynamics on complex networks: A review (2015, background): “Also, the basic reproductive number of a disease must exceed a certain threshold for individuals to feel self-protective behavior is worth the effort [58].”