Image of puzzle pieces forming a circuit
Image of puzzle pieces forming a circuit

Impact of Strategic Behavior on Inequities in Health Outcomes during COVID-19

Contacts
Sponsor

Global Infectious Disease Institute

Inequities in health and economic outcomes have been widely observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our central hypothesis is that individuals' strategic reactions to governmental interventions play an important role in these inequities. We will help understand these inequities through the: (1) Development of game-theoretical models to understand individuals' behaviors during the epidemic, and (2) Characterization of inequities in the resulting equilibria.

Standard notions of unfairness, such as "demographic parity", fails to take into account several crucial characteristics in our domain, namely network effects, the price of uncertainty, multiple-criteria utilities, and historic inequity. Understanding the impacts relative to these metrics, and identifying the right ones for COVID-19, will be one of our goals.

Achla Marathe headshot

Achla Marathe

Professor

Professor of Public Health Sciences, School of Medicine

Anil headshot

Anil Vullikanti

Professor

Professor of Computer Science, School of Engineering and Applied Science

Other Team Members

Haifeng Xu | Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science | University of Virginia

Deborah Hellman | Professor, School of Law | University of Virginia