Evolutionary Game Theoretic Insights on the SIRS Model of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Madeo, Dario; Mocenni, Chiara

doi:10.1016/j.ifacol.2021.11.016

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 17 publications

(12 reference statements)

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“…They want to avoid the side effects of vaccines. For this reason, a reduction in the vaccination rate by egoistic people creates a 'social dilemma' in which vaccinations do not reduce the risk of infection but rather significantly increase the infection rate again 11 – 13 . Those wishing to respond to infectious diseases should understand the potential interactions in vaccine networks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attitudinal analysis of vaccination effects to lead endemic phases

Kim

Peck

et al. 2023

Sci Rep

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To achieve endemic phases, repeated vaccinations are necessary. However, individuals may grapple with whether to get vaccinated due to potential side effects. When an individual is already immune due to previous infections or vaccinations, the perceived risk from vaccination is often less than the risk of infection. Yet, repeated rounds of vaccination can lead to avoidance, impeding the establishment of endemic phases. We explore this phenomenon using an individual-based Monte Carlo simulation, validating our findings with game theory. The Nash equilibrium encapsulates individuals' non-cooperative behavior, while the system's optimal value represents the societal benefits of altruistic cooperation. We define the difference between these as the price of anarchy. Our simulations reveal that the price of anarchy must fall below a threshold of 12.47 for endemic phases to be achieved in a steady state. This suggests that for a basic reproduction number of 10, a consistent vaccination rate greater than 89% is required. These findings offer new insights into vaccination-related decision-making and can inform effective strategies to tackle infectious diseases.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attitudinal analysis of vaccination effects to lead endemic phases

Kim

Peck

et al. 2023

Sci Rep

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“…Despite the above large literature taking reasonably into account the presence of a network and its role in the disease spreading, in this paper we focus on the interplay between epidemiological and social dynamics from a mean field point of view, since our main objective is to find simple mechanisms regulating people's behavior and cooperation during a pandemic event in a large and complex nation like Italy. Similar approaches have been taken into account in [28], and deeply studied in [29], where the relationship between control measures, vaccine hesitation, information retrieval, and policy making has been investigated to enforce cooperative behavior aimed to reduce the virus' spread.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identification and Control of Game-Based Epidemic Models

Madeo

Mocenni

2022

Games

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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.

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