Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Epidemic mitigation comes with a price in practice, and when budget is limited, its effective allocation becomes an important question on public policy. In this paper, we study epidemic control through a Stackelberg mean-field game in which a principal, representing the government, chooses social distancing guidelines and vaccination levels for a large population of rational minor agents subject to a budget-spending process. The principal anticipates the minor agents mean-field Nash equilibrium (MFNE) and selects intervention policies to minimize her own objective, inducing a bi-level optimal control problem. We define the Stackelberg mean-field game equilibrium (SMFE) and give its necessary condition by a forward-backward ordinary differential equation (FBODE) system, and provide existence and uniqueness results. We further propose an iterative fixed-point algorithm to solve the FBODE numerically and present computational observations that illustrate the resulting equilibrium behavior.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Liu, Huaning, Dayanikli, Gokce
Institution: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Language: English
Subfield: Finance
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W7213608040