Game Theory and Diseases
https://phys.org/news/2018-09-game-theory-disease-outbreaks.html
While Game Theory are typically used in the fields of Economics or Mathematics, this article introduces how Game Theory can actually be applied to the safety of the human population and people’s decisions about healthcare. These decisions can have profound effects on the well-being of the entire human race when considering the issue of disease spreading. Game Theory can help predict what people how people are going to act to prevent disease spreading and how it affects the rest of the population. It’s a very powerful tool for public authorities to properly implement control measures to decrease the chance of a major outbreak. I’ve never really thought about this concept outside of the scope of the examples in my economics and math classes. This article revealed to me that healthcare and economics are just a few of the limitless fields in which Game Theory can help play an important role.
By definition, Game Theory is the study about how the outcome of a person’s decision depends on how they choose from their options, as well as the choices made by other people with whom they are interacting. This article addresses situations like how people decide on getting vaccinations. The flu is potentially a fatal disease, so it’s reasonable to think that everyone would want to get vaccinated. Under this assumption, if everyone else is vaccinated, it would be very unlikely for a person to be encounter the flu. However, if everyone had this same thought and decided not to get vaccinated, then no one would be protected. Although this example may seem like a very extreme and unlikely situation, it actually has happened before with measles, mumps and rubella. With a decrease in the number of people getting vaccinated in the US and Europe, there was an outbreak leading to deaths and other serious injuries.