Voluntary nonpharmaceutical intervention as a feedback-evolving game
Abstract
Nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as mask wearing, can reduce epidemic spread, but their effectiveness depends on whether people adopt and sustain them. The incentive to adhere changes with infection risk and with the behavior of others. Yet it remains unclear how epidemiological protection and social reinforcement determine the strategic structure of infection control, and how epidemic feedback changes that structure over time. Here, we develop a socio-epidemiological model in which prevalence changes behavioral incentives while adherence changes transmission, separating private protection from source control and incorporating conformity. At a given prevalence, private protection favors adherence, source control creates opportunities for free-riding, and conformity reinforces whichever behavior is already common, generating distinct adherence games. Because adherence reduces transmission and prevalence, the population can move between these games as the epidemic unfolds. This feedback can stabilize partial adherence, create alternative behavioral norms, or generate recurrent epidemic-behavior cycles. Moreover, interventions with the same population-level effect on transmission at a given adherence level can produce different long-term outcomes when protection is distributed differently between the individual and others. Thus, voluntary infection control is a feedback-evolving game whose outcome depends not only on epidemiological efficacy but also on who is protected and how behavior is socially reinforced.
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BibTeX
@misc{kumata2026voluntary,
title = {{Voluntary nonpharmaceutical intervention as a feedback-evolving game}},
author = {Ryuichi Kumata and Hiromu Ito and Masato Yamamichi},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.12519},
eprint = {2610.12519},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12519},
note = {CC BY-NC-SA 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Voluntary nonpharmaceutical intervention as a feedback-evolving game
AU - Ryuichi Kumata
AU - Hiromu Ito
AU - Masato Yamamichi
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/07
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.12519
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12519
AB - Nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as mask wearing, can reduce epidemic spread, but their effectiveness depends on whether people adopt and sustain them. The incentive to adhere changes with infection risk and with the behavior of others. Yet it remains unclear how epidemiological protection and social reinforcement determine the strategic structure of infection control, and how epidemic feedback changes that structure over time. Here, we develop a socio-epidemiological model in which prevalence changes behavioral incentives while adherence changes transmission, separating private protection from source control and incorporating conformity. At a given prevalence, private protection favors adherence, source control creates opportunities for free-riding, and conformity reinforces whichever behavior is already common, generating distinct adherence games. Because adherence reduces transmission and prevalence, the population can move between these games as the epidemic unfolds. This feedback can stabilize partial adherence, create alternative behavioral norms, or generate recurrent epidemic-behavior cycles. Moreover, interventions with the same population-level effect on transmission at a given adherence level can produce different long-term outcomes when protection is distributed differently between the individual and others. Thus, voluntary infection control is a feedback-evolving game whose outcome depends not only on epidemiological efficacy but also on who is protected and how behavior is socially reinforced.
ER -