5 research outputs found
Selfish Response to Epidemic Propagation
An epidemic spreading in a network calls for a decision on the part of the
network members: They should decide whether to protect themselves or not. Their
decision depends on the trade-off between their perceived risk of being
infected and the cost of being protected. The network members can make
decisions repeatedly, based on information that they receive about the changing
infection level in the network.
We study the equilibrium states reached by a network whose members increase
(resp. decrease) their security deployment when learning that the network
infection is widespread (resp. limited). Our main finding is that the
equilibrium level of infection increases as the learning rate of the members
increases. We confirm this result in three scenarios for the behavior of the
members: strictly rational cost minimizers, not strictly rational, and strictly
rational but split into two response classes. In the first two cases, we
completely characterize the stability and the domains of attraction of the
equilibrium points, even though the first case leads to a differential
inclusion. We validate our conclusions with simulations on human mobility
traces.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures, submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Automatic
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