Evolutionary Game Analysis of Collaborative Prevention and Control for Public Health Emergencies

Abstract

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, strengthening collaborative prevention and control of public health emergencies has become an important element of social governance. In the process of collaborative prevention and control of public health emergencies, there is a complex game relationship among government agencies, the Internet media and the general public. In order to explore the evolution process of participants’ behavioral strategies, a trilateral evolutionary game model is constructed, and a system dynamics approach is further adopted to simulate the heterogeneous effect of different initial strategies and epidemic spread probability on the evolution of strategies. The results show that the tripartite equilibrium strategies are (0,0,0), (1,1,1), and (0,1,1) during the early stage, outbreak stage, and resumption stage of COVID-19, respectively. Then, taking the resumption stage as an example, the system strategy will eventually stabilize at the equilibrium point (0,1,1) when the initial probabilities of these three subjects are all equal to 0.2, 0.5 or 0.8. When the initial probability of Internet media is set to be 0.2, the public’s strategies converge faster than government agencies. As the initial probability of Internet media increases to 0.5 or 0.8, the convergence time of government agencies will be shortened from 40 weeks to 29 weeks or 18 weeks, whereas the opposite is true for the general publicWhen the epidemic spread probability p2=0.5, government agencies reach the equilibrium strategy after 20 weeks. As p2 increases to 0.7 and 0.9, the convergence time of government agencies becomes 27 weeks and 31 weeks, and the Internet media and the general public will converge more quickly toward the stable strategy. This paper links the theoretical study with the realistic prevention and control of COVID-19 to provide decision-making support and policy recommendations for the scientific prevention, and contributes to the sustainable development of society.