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.
Highlights
Games 2022, 13, 10. https://The recent coronavirus pandemic enforced the application of control measures for restraining the virus diffusion
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
This paper presents an extended model, called IGM, which integrates a standard epidemic system and evolutionary games, used to describe the propensity of people and institutions to be cooperative, adopting the measures taken to control the epidemic
Summary
Games 2022, 13, 10. https://The recent coronavirus pandemic enforced the application of control measures for restraining the virus diffusion. More often, when taking decisions under strong pressure, such as, for example, in the initial phases of the pandemic, the requirement of strong efforts may activate in the population selfish and conservative mechanisms, which often lead to the temptation to exploit the cooperative behavior of the others and to the fear of being betrayed by their incorrect conduct. An example of these mechanisms is represented by the panic buying that arose at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic (see, for example, [2])
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