The economic approach to modeling self-protective behavior in epidemiology

Abstract

The economic approach to studying the transmission of infectious diseases provides an analytical framework for making predictions about how people will respond to an epidemic. Furthermore, this framework can be used for normative analysis to determine how various policies and control strategies can affect the well-being of the population under consideration. By examining explicitly people's incentives to alter their behavior in response to an infectious disease, the economic approach often yields counterintuitive results with significant policy implications.