The application of Game Theory to prevent disease outbreaks.
http://theconversation.com/game-theory-can-help-prevent-disease-outbreaks-102934
When it comes to taking a decision about health, what’s best for an individual might not be the best for the wider population, and vice versa. As a result, authorities often face difficult choices to protect the whole population. We can see a real life situation of this dilemma through vaccination. While vaccines protect people from diseases, they also cost people money, time, pain from injection etc. Therefore, people taking them have to weigh up the cost against the benefits of taking them. If everybody in the population take the vaccine, then individuals will be less exposed to the disease. And so not getting the vaccine might appear to be the better choice. However, if everybody thinks the same way, no one will be protected from an outbreak. In this example, the individual might be better off, but the whole population suffers from his/her decision.
According to Game theory, sometimes the best strategy for an individual can often conflict with the optimal strategy for the well-being of the whole group. During the outbreak of Ebola in 2014, authorities tried to prevent people flying from one region to another as an effort to contain the disease. However, researched showed that such measures only delayed the onset of the epidemic in other regions and may have stopped aid workers reach affected areas. Therefore, how could authorities reach Nash Equilibrium?
An article released in the Journal Royal Society Interface states that people could choose to travel or not based on the risk perceived. If the outbreak is high and frequently updated in the news, individuals would choose not to travel. This will be in line with authorities’ desires for a travel ban. If this idea were to be implemented, there will be other external factors that affect the expansion of the disease. From what we have learned in class, Game theory is designed to address situations in which the outcome of a person’s decision depends not just on how they choose among several options, but also depends on the choices made by the people they are interacting with. What authorities could do, is to use game theory to predict individual’s choices taking into account all the factors and stablish rules to minimize the impact of individual decisions that go against the benefit of the whole population.