Related papers: When abstinence increases prevalence
The well-known Condorcet Jury Theorem states that, under majority rule, the better of two alternatives is chosen with probability approaching one as the population grows. We study an asymmetric setting where voters face varying…
Self-interested behavior from individuals can collectively lead to poor societal outcomes. These outcomes can seemingly be improved through the actions of altruistic agents, which benefit other agents in the system. However, it is known in…
The design of protocols to suppress the propagation of viral infections is an enduring enterprise, especially hindered by limited knowledge of the mechanisms through which extinction of infection propagation comes about. We here report on a…
Competition within the immune system may degrade immune control of viral infections. We formalize the evolution that occurs in both HIV-1 and the immune system quasispecies. Inclusion of competition in the immune system leads to a novel…
The spread of sexually transmitted diseases (e.g. Chlamydia, Syphilis, Gonorrhea, HIV) across populations is a major concern for scientists and health agencies. In this context, both data collection on sexual contact networks and the…
With significant population fractions in many societies who refuse vaccines, it is important to reconsider how vaccination is incorporated into compartmental epidemiology models. It is still most common to apply the vaccination rate to the…
We consider the problem of optimal risk sharing in a pool of cooperative agents. We analyze the asymptotic behavior of the certainty equivalents and risk premia associated with the Pareto optimal risk sharing contract as the pool expands.…
Multilevel selection is an important organizing principle that crucially underlies evolutionary processes from the emergence of cells to eusociality and the economics of nations. Previous studies on multilevel selection assumed that the…
This paper investigates whether the decoy effect - specifically the attraction effect - can foster cooperation in social networks. In a lab experiment, we show that introducing a dominated option increases the selection of the target…
Major advances in public health have resulted from disease prevention. However, prevention of a new infectious disease by vaccination or pharmaceuticals is made difficult by the slow process of vaccine and drug development. We propose an…
In evolutionary algorithms, the fitness of a population increases with time by mutating and recombining individuals and by a biased selection of more fit individuals. The right selection pressure is critical in ensuring sufficient…
We develop a framework in which individuals' preferences coevolve with their abilities to deceive others about their preferences and intentions. Specifically, individuals are characterised by (i) a level of cognitive sophistication and (ii)…
Urban areas with larger and more connected populations offer an auspicious environment for contagion processes such as the spread of pathogens. Empirical evidence reveals a systematic increase in the rates of certain sexually transmitted…
The spread of disinformation poses a significant threat to societal well-being. We analyze this phenomenon using an evolutionary game theory model of the sender-receiver game, where senders aim to mislead receivers and receivers aim to…
Rewarding cooperation is in many ways expected behaviour from social players. However, strategies that promote antisocial behaviour are also surprisingly common, not just in human societies, but also among eusocial insects and bacteria.…
In the first part of this paper, we review old and new results about the influence of host population heterogeneity on (various characteristics of) epidemic outbreaks. In the second part we highlight a modelling issue that so far has…
Humans, domestic animals, orchard crops, and ornamental plants are commonly treated with antibiotics in response to bacterial infection. By curing infectious individuals, antibiotic therapy might limit the spread of contagious disease among…
Research on friendship networks in schools suggests that heterogeneity increases homophily preferences. We argue that this may be a misleading interpretation of the coefficients of the exponential random graph models (p*) that are used to…
In this letter, we mainly consider an MSM (men have sex with men) network to analysis how monogamy behavior can influence the transmission of HIV. By calculating and analyzing the basic reproductive number of that network, we find the…
Online dating emerged as a key platform for human mating. Previous research focused on socio-demographic characteristics to explain human mating in online dating environments, neglecting the commonly recognized relevance of sport. This…