Related papers: When abstinence increases prevalence
It has recently become established that the spread of infectious diseases between humans is affected not only by the pathogen itself but also by changes in behavior as the population becomes aware of the epidemic; for example, social…
We introduce and study an evolutionary complementarity game where in each round a player of population 1 is paired with a member of population 2. The game is symmetric, and each player tries to obtain an advantageous deal, but when one of…
When beneficial mutations are rare, they accumulate by a series of selective sweeps. But when they are common, many beneficial mutations will occur before any can fix, so there will be many different mutant lineages in the population…
We consider a social choice problem where only a small number of people out of a large population are sufficiently available or motivated to vote. A common solution to increase participation is to allow voters use a proxy, that is, transfer…
Cooperation is a persistent behavioral pattern of entities pooling and sharing resources. Its ubiquity in nature poses a conundrum. Whenever two entities cooperate, one must willingly relinquish something of value to the other. Why is this…
Opposition to vaccination has long been a non-negligible public health phenomenon resulted from people's varied perceptions toward vaccination (e.g., vaccine-phobia). This paper investigates the voluntary vaccination behavior of a…
Political messages increasingly bundle economic policy arguments with moral social policy stances. Using survey experiments with roughly 6,500 U.S. adults, I show that such bundling sharply weakens economic persuasion among respondents who…
We extend the notion of boycotts in cooperative games from one-on-one boycotts between single players to boycotts between coalitions. We prove that convex games offer a proper setting for studying the impact of boycotts. Boycotts have a…
The paper analyses how draw constraints influence the outcome of a knockout tournament. The research question is inspired by European club football competitions, where the organiser generally imposes an association constraint in the first…
Recent empirical findings suggest that societies have become more polarized in various countries. That is, the median voter of today represents a smaller fraction of society compared to two decades ago and yet, the mechanisms underlying…
We study a modification of the so-called Parrondo's paradox where a large number of individuals choose the game they want to play by voting. We show that it can be better for the players to vote randomly than to vote according to their own…
As a simple model for criminal behavior, the traditional two-strategy inspection game yields counterintuitive results that fail to describe empirical data. The latter shows that crime is often recurrent, and that crime rates do not respond…
It is shown that in the case of a single decision maker who optimizes several possibly conflicting objectives, the amount of information available in preference relations among pairs of possible decisions, when compared with all other…
The success of a vaccination program is crucially dependent on its adoption by a critical fraction of the population, as the resulting herd immunity prevents future outbreaks of an epidemic. However, the effectiveness of a campaign can…
Preventing infectious disease like flu from spreading to large communities is one of the most important issues for humans. One effective strategy is voluntary vaccination, however, there is always the temptation for people refusing to be…
Estimating prevalence, the fraction of a population with a certain medical condition, is fundamental to epidemiology. Traditional methods rely on classification of test samples taken at random from a population. Such approaches to…
Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population. A better prediction of the true…
We all have preferences when multiple choices are available. If we insist on satisfying our preferences only, we may suffer a loss due to conflicts with other people's identical selections. Such a case applies when the choice cannot be…
Infectious diseases often spread faster near their peak than would be predicted given early data on transmission. Despite the commonality of this phenomena, there are no known general mechanisms able to cause an exponentially spreading dis-…
The diffusion of COVID19 is calling governments and public health authorities to interventions that limit new infections and contain the expected number of critical cases and deaths. Most of these measures rely on the compliance of people,…