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Economic epidemiology


Economic epidemiology is a field at the intersection of epidemiology and economics. Its premise is to incorporate incentives for healthy behavior and their attendant behavioral responses into an epidemiological context to better understand how diseases are transmitted. This framework should help improve policy responses to epidemic diseases by giving policymakers and health-care providers clear tools for thinking about how certain actions can influence the spread of disease transmission.

The main context through which this field emerged was the idea of prevalence-dependence, or disinhibition, which suggests that individuals change their behavior as the prevalence of a disease changes. However, economic epidemiology also encompasses other ideas, including the role of externalities, global disease commons and how individuals’ incentives can influence the outcome and cost of health interventions.

Strategic epidemiology is a branch of economic epidemiology that adopts an explicitly game theoretic approach to analyzing the interplay between individual behavior and population wide disease dynamics.

The spread of an infectious disease is a population-level phenomenon, but decisions to prevent or treat a disease are typically made by individuals who may change their behavior over the course of an epidemic, especially if their perception of risk changes depending on the available information on the epidemics – their decisions will then have population-level consequences. For example, an individual may choose to have unsafe sex or a doctor may prescribe antibiotics to someone without a confirmed bacterial infection. In both cases, the choice may be rational from the individual’s point of view but undesirable from a societal perspective.

Limiting the spread of a disease at the population level requires changing individual behavior, which in turn depends on what information individuals have about the level of risk. When risk is low, people will tend to ignore it. However, if the risk of infection is higher, individuals are more likely to take preventive action. Moreover, the more transmissible the pathogen, the greater the incentive is to make personal investments for control.


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