Related papers: When abstinence increases prevalence
Tournaments are frequently used incentive mechanisms to enhance performance. In this paper, we use field data and show that skill disparities among contestants asymmetrically affect the performance of contestants. Skill disparities have…
Ingroup favoritism, the tendency to favor ingroup over outgroup, is often explained as a product of intergroup conflict, or correlations between group tags and behavior. Such accounts assume that group membership is meaningful, whereas…
Real social interactions occur on networks in which each individual is connected to some, but not all, of others. In social dilemma games with a fixed population size, heterogeneity in the number of contacts per player is known to promote…
The effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions to curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is determined by numerous contextual factors, including adherence. Conventional wisdom holds that the effectiveness of protective behaviour such as…
The concept of fitness is central to evolution, but it quantifies only the expected number of offspring an individual will produce. The actual number of offspring is also subject to noise, arising from environmental or demographic…
The matching hypothesis in social psychology claims that people are more likely to form a committed relationship with someone equally attractive. Previous works on stochastic models of human mate choice process indicate that patterns…
Polarization of opinions about vaccination can have a negative impact on pandemic control. In this work we quantify this negative impact for the transmission of COVID-19, using an agent based simulation in an heterogeneous population with…
Detection of rare traits or diseases in a large population is challenging. Pool testing allows covering larger swathes of population at a reduced cost, while simplifying logistics. However, testing precision decreases as it becomes unclear…
Cooperators forgo their interest to benefit others. Thus cooperation should not be favored by natural selection. It challenges the evolutionists, since cooperation is widespread. As one of the resolutions, information spreading has been…
Observational learning often involves congestion: an agent gets lower payoff from an action when more predecessors have taken that action. This preference to act differently from previous agents may paradoxically increase all but one…
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
The decision of whether or not to vaccinate is a complex one. It involves the contribution both to a social good -- herd immunity -- and to one's own well being. It is informed by social influence, personal experience, education, and mass…
As humanity struggles to contain the global Covid-19 infection, prophylactic actions are grandly slowed down by the shortage of testing kits. Governments have taken several measures to work around this shortage: the FDA has become more…
Livestock industries are vulnerable to disease threats, which can cost billions of dollars and have substantial negative social ramifications. Losses are mitigated through increased use of disease-related biosecurity practices, making…
Sexual contacts are the main spreading route of HIV. This puts sex workers at higher risk of infection even in populations where HIV prevalence is moderate or low. Alongside condom use, Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) is an effective tool…
The preferential treatment of in-group members is widely observed. This study examines this phenomenon in the domain of cooperation in social dilemmas using evolutionary agent-based models that consider the role of partner selection. The…
We consider the disclosure problem of a sender with a large data set of hard evidence who wants to persuade a receiver to take higher actions. Because the receiver will make inferences based on the distribution of the data they see, the…
HIV increases the likelihood that a person will develop TB. Starting them on anti-retroviral therapy (ART) reduces their risk of TB but not to the level in HIV negative people. Since HIV-positive people who are on ART can expect to live a…
Urbanization promotes economy, mobility, access and availability of resources, but on the other hand, generates higher levels of pollution, violence, crime, and mental distress. The health consequences of the agglomeration of people living…
We consider a model for an epidemic in a population that occupies geographically distinct locations. The disease is spread within subpopulations by contacts between infective and susceptible individuals, and is spread between subpopulations…