Improving policy design and epidemic response using integrated models of economic choice and disease dynamics with behavioral feedback
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Human behavior plays a crucial role in infectious disease transmission, yet traditional models often overlook or oversimplify this factor, limiting predictions of disease spread and the associated socioeconomic impacts. Here we introduce a feedback-informed epidemiological model that integrates human behavior with disease dynamics in a credible, tractable, and extendable manner. From economics, we incorporate a dynamic decision-making model where individuals assess the trade-off between disease risks and economic consequences, and then link this to a risk-stratified compartmental model of disease spread taken from epidemiology. In the unified framework, heterogeneous individuals make choices based on current and future payoffs, influencing their risk of infection and shaping population-level disease dynamics. As an example, we model disease-decision feedback during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the decision to participate in paid, in-person work was a major determinant of disease risk. Comparing the impacts of stylized policy options representing mandatory, incentivized/compensated, and voluntary work abstention, we find that accounting for disease-behavior feedback has a significant impact on the relative health and economic impacts of policies. Including two crucial dimensions of heterogeneity-health and economic vulnerability-the results highlight how inequities between risk groups can be exacerbated or alleviated by disease control measures. Importantly, we show that a policy of more stringent workplace testing can potentially slow virus spread and, surprisingly, increase labor supply since individuals otherwise inclined to remain at home to avoid infection perceive a safer workplace. In short, our framework permits the exploration of avenues whereby health and wealth need not always be at odds. This flexible and extendable modeling framework offers a powerful tool for understanding the interplay between human behavior and disease spread.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".