Game Theory Article
Article Link: https://phys.org/news/2018-09-game-theory-disease-outbreaks.html
This article was written by “The Conservation”, and it talks about how economic concepts like Game Theoryand Nash Equilibriumcould potentially improve researchers’ understanding of vaccines, diseases, and human behavior (individually and collectively). The article begins by discussing a recent event where multiple passengers on a flight from Dubai to New York were found to be ill, which then led to a quarantine of the plane. The write decides to include this story in the introduction in order to make a certain message clear to the reader: “What’s best for us as individuals might not always be the best thing for the wider population, and vice versa.” The article then goes on to introduce several other cases/scenarios where Game Theoryideas are used to better understand the given situation. MMR vaccine and Ebola virus are two other cases that the author includes in this article in order to further the argument that “the best strategy for an individual can often be in conflict with the optimal strategy for the well-being of the whole group.” The article concludes by saying that economic concepts like Nash Equilibriumcan help public authorities by giving them a hint about what individuals are most likely to do in any given situation.
This article connects very closely to the lectures and homework problems for CS 2850. Game Theory, Nash Equilibrium, and Strategies are all very important concepts/topic that have showed up recently in the problems that we have been tackling in Networks class. What’s interesting about this article is that unlike the problems that we see in the lectures, the situations that appear in the article are very intricate and complex. This article is worth reading, especially if you are taking Networks, because it allows the reader to realize that concepts learned in Networks are only primitive models of what the real-world is like. The problems that we study in Networks have very limited parameters and only deal with a small population, whereas the scenarios that this article introduces are all very complex with many parameters to think about. The biggest thing that I took away from this article is that Game Theory must be taken with a grain of salt; problems in the real-world are very difficult to model/analyze.