Strategic decision making about travel during disease outbreaks: a game theoretical approach.

ABSTRACT: Visitors can play an important role in the spread of infections. Here, we incorporate an epidemic model into a game theoretical framework to investigate the effects of travel strategies on infection control. Potential visitors must decide whether to travel to a destination that is at risk of infectious disease outbreaks. We compare the individually optimal (Nash equilibrium) strategy to the group optimal strategy that maximizes the overall population utility. Economic epidemiological models often find that individual and group optimal strategies are very different. By contrast, we find perfect agreement between individual and group optimal strategies across a wide parameter regime. For more limited regimes where disagreement does occur, the disagreement is (i) generally very extreme; (ii)

SUBMITTER: Zhao S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6170783 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature