Prospect Theory Based Individual Irrationality Modelling and Behavior Inducement in Pandemic Control

Abstract

Understanding and modeling individuals’ behaviors during epidemics is crucial for effective epidemic control. However, existing research ignores the impact of users’ irrationality on decision-making in the epidemic. Meanwhile, existing disease control methods often assume users’ full compliance with measures like mandatory isolation, which does not align with the actual situation. To address these issues, this paper proposes a prospect theory-based framework to model users’ decision-making process in epidemics and analyzes how irrationality affects individuals’ behaviors and epidemic dynamics. According to the analysis results, irrationality tends to prompt conservative behaviors when the infection risk is low but encourages risk-seeking behaviors when the risk is high. Then, this paper proposes a behavior inducement algorithm to guide individuals’ behaviors and control the spread of disease. Simulations and real user tests validate our analysis, and simulation results show that the proposed behavior inducement algorithm can effectively guide individuals’ behavior.