How to Guard Your Six-Feet Bubble
Months into the pandemic, social distancing has become the norm in our daily lives. Stores have 6 ft apart stickers on the floor, you walk behind people, and face it, some of us have been enjoying being alone. Sandroni writes in the article posted at Kellogg Insight that social distancing is analogous to friendships. One friend wants to be closer while the other friend wants to be a bit farther. As ironic as it may be, the closer the friendship, the greater the likelihood of hurting one another – the closer the distance, the more likely the virus will spread. Then how should we act to reduce the likelihood of both us being hurt and the virus spreading? Sandroni explains that the answer lies in game theory.
Game theory is defined as the “study of the ways in which interacting choices of economic agents produce outcomes with respect to the preferences of those agents, where the outcomes in question might have been intended by none of the agents.” The theory comes with two kinds of strategies: pure and mixed. In a pure strategy solution, each player would make the same move regardless of the circumstance. In a mixed, the player’s strategy would be randomized to be unpredictable, assigning probabilities to each move.
In social distancing, there are two people, each of whom has an optimal distance they’d like to be from the other. This may be 6ft, less than 6ft, greater than 6ft, or no preference at all even. The closer each person is to their optimal, the happier they are, and each player simultaneously decides how far apart to stand. How should each person strategize how far apart to stand from the other? Let’s say the first person wants to be 8 ft away from the other, whereas the second person wants to be 4 feet away from the other. The best strategy the first person could take is to randomize in which direction to be 8 ft away from the other. The best strategy for the second would ironically be to stay put. This is because if the second person decides to be 4 ft away, but this happens to be in the opposite direction of the first person, the two would end up being 12 ft away from each other. On the other hand, if the second stays put, there is a guarantee of the distance being 8 ft. Though this does not make the second person happy, it’s a lot better than being 12 ft away.
In conclusion, staying put or randomizing your location in social distancing are the best moves. With consequences as high as not only your own life but a possibly exponentially growing number of lives around you, I’d really suggest either of these strategies.
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/social-distance-closeness-game-theory