Learning to Mitigate Epidemic Risks: A Dynamic Population Game Approach

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.