Controlling the Outbreak of COVID-19: A Noncooperative Game Perspective

TL;DR

This paper models COVID-19 social distancing and isolation as a noncooperative game, proposing an incentive-based approach that promotes social distancing and maintains lockdown sustainability, validated through numerical analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a game-theoretic incentive model for social distancing during COVID-19, demonstrating the existence of Nash equilibrium and effectiveness through extensive simulations.

Findings

Individual incentive increases over 85% with higher home isolation.

Incentive decreases as the number of individuals increases at a fixed isolation level.

The proposed model effectively promotes social distancing in a noncooperative setting.

Abstract

COVID-19 is a global epidemic. Till now, there is no remedy for this epidemic. However, isolation and social distancing are seemed to be effective preventive measures to control this pandemic. Therefore, in this paper, an optimization problem is formulated that accommodates both isolation and social distancing features of the individuals. To promote social distancing, we solve the formulated problem by applying a noncooperative game that can provide an incentive for maintaining social distancing to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Furthermore, the sustainability of the lockdown policy is interpreted with the help of our proposed game-theoretic incentive model for maintaining social distancing where there exists a Nash equilibrium. Finally, we perform an extensive numerical analysis that shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of achieving the desired social-distancing to prevent the outbreak of the COVID-19 in a noncooperative environment. Numerical results show that the individual incentive increases more than 85% with an increasing percentage of home isolation from 25% to 100% for all considered scenarios. The numerical results also demonstrate that in a particular percentage of home isolation, the individual incentive decreases with an increasing number of individuals.