Common group dynamic drives modern epidemics across social, financial and biological domains

TL;DR

This paper presents a unifying framework for understanding epidemic-like processes across social, financial, and biological domains, emphasizing the role of group dynamics and network evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a minimal model that captures diverse epidemic profiles by varying group formation and transmission timescales, bridging gaps in existing epidemiological theory.

Findings

Different epidemic profiles can be reproduced by the model

Dynamic group evolution influences outbreak control strategies

The framework applies across multiple societal domains

Abstract

We show that qualitatively different epidemic-like processes from distinct societal domains (finance, social and commercial blockbusters, epidemiology) can be quantitatively understood using the same unifying conceptual framework taking into account the interplay between the timescales of the grouping and fragmentation of social groups together with typical epidemic transmission processes. Different domain-specific empirical infection profiles, featuring multiple resurgences and abnormal decay times, are reproduced simply by varying the timescales for group formation and individual transmission. Our model emphasizes the need to account for the dynamic evolution of multi-connected networks. Our results reveal a new minimally-invasive dynamical method for controlling such outbreaks, help fill a gap in existing epidemiological theory, and offer a new understanding of complex system response functions.