Game Theory of Social Distancing in Response to an Epidemic

Abstract

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. One of the easiest ways for people to lower their risk of infection during an epidemic is for them to reduce their rate of contact with infectious individuals. However, the value of such actions depends on how the epidemic progresses. Few analyses of behavior change to date have accounted for how changes in behavior change the epidemic wave. In this paper, I calculate the tradeoff between daily social distancing behavior and reductions in infection risk now and in the future. The subsequent analysis shows that, for the parameters and functional forms studied, social distancing is most useful for moderately transmissible diseases. Social distancing is particularly useful when it is inexpensive and can delay the epidemic until a vaccine becomes widely available. However, the benefits of social distancing are small for highly transmissible diseases when no vaccine is available.