The Game of Death, What Contagious Diseases have to do with John Nash
https://phys.org/news/2018-09-game-theory-disease-outbreaks.html
Amidst recent outbreaks of Ebola, Malaria, and Zika, Governments and Disease control agencies are searching for a best practice of containing deadly diseases. In today’s world, with the whole planet becoming more and more connected with international flights, the internet, and general ease of communication, it is more important than ever to have a winning strategy when dealing with diseases.
Istavan Zoltan Kiss and Nicos Georgiou wrote the article showing how contagious diseases can be modeled using game theory. This game can have catastrophic consequences if regulatory bodies cannot accurately predict how individuals will react before and during an outbreak. One example they give is vaccinations. Vaccinations are overall a good thing for society and individuals, but they can have short-term downsides such as cost, pain, getting a minor form of the illness so some individuals may perceive them as not worth it. If the majority of people in a society think like this, no one is protected and a considerable outbreak may occur. In this case, an individuals strategy may vary from what is best for a group. Knowing this, a dominant strategy for a government may be to advertise or subsidize vaccines for them to have a higher payoff for individuals, and thus more people get vaccinated.
This thinking can also be applied to quarantining affected areas. If a travel ban is put into place during an outbreak, it may impede medical workers from helping cure the disease. Since there is no “winning strategy,” we can use the concepts on Nash equilibriums to show how factors that the government can control affect the travel to a certain region, and therefore the spread of a disease. The Nash equilibrium in this case will let the regulatory body choose the best case scenario for the majority of population.