THE SPREAD OF AN EPIDEMIC: A GAME-THEORETIC APPROACH

Authors

• Sayar Karmakar, University of Florida
• Moumanti Podder, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Pune
• Souvik Roy, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata
• Soumyarup Sadhukhan, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur

Article Type

Research Article

Publication Title

Advances in Applied Probability

Abstract

We introduce and study a game-theoretic model to understand the spread of an epidemic in a homogeneous population. A discrete-time stochastic process is considered where, in each epoch, first, a randomly chosen agent updates their action trying to maximize a proposed utility function, and then agents who have viral exposures beyond their immunity get infected. Our main results discuss asymptotic limiting distributions of both the cardinality of the subset of infected agents and the action profile, considered under various values of two parameters (initial action and immunity profile). We also show that the theoretical distributions are almost always achieved in the first few epochs.

First Page

749

Last Page

810

DOI

10.1017/apr.2024.64

Publication Date

9-1-2025

Recommended Citation

Karmakar, Sayar; Podder, Moumanti; Roy, Souvik; and Sadhukhan, Soumyarup, "THE SPREAD OF AN EPIDEMIC: A GAME-THEORETIC APPROACH" (2025). Journal Articles. 5622.
https://digitalcommons.isical.ac.in/journal-articles/5622