Game-Theoretic Frameworks for Epidemic Spreading and Human Decision Making: A Review

This review presents and reviews various solved and open problems in developing, analyzing, and mitigating epidemic spreading processes under human decision-making. We provide a review of a range of epidemic models and explain the pros and cons of different epidemic models. We exhibit the art of coupling epidemic models and decision models in the existing literature. More specifically, fundamental questions in human decision-making amid epidemics such as what interventions are taken to combat the disease, who are decision-makers, when interventions are taken, and how interventions are modeled. Among many decision models, game-theoretic models have become increasingly crucial in modeling human responses/behavior amid epidemics in the last decade. In this review, we motivate the game-theoretic approach to human decision-making amid epidemics. This review provides an overview of the existing literature by developing a multi-dimensional taxonomy, which categorizes existing works based on multiple dimensions, including 1) types of games, such as differential games, stochastic games, evolutionary games, and static games; 2) types of interventions, such as social distancing, vaccination, quarantine, taking antidotes, etc.; 3) the types of decision-makers, such as individuals, adversaries, and central authorities at different hierarchical levels. A fine-grained dynamic game framework is proposed to capture the essence of game-theoretic decision-making amid epidemics. From a vast body of works, we showcase three representative works with unique ways of integrating game-theoretic decision-making into the epidemic models. The uniqueness of each of these three works distinguishes themselves from each other regarding their models, analytical approaches, and results. In the end, we identify several main open problems and research gaps left to be addressed and filled.