TY - JOUR T1 - Game Theory of Social Distancing in Response to an Epidemic A1 - Reluga, Timothy C. Y1 - 2010/05/27 N2 - Author Summary One of the easiest ways for people to lower their risk of infection during an epidemic is for them to reduce their rate of contact with infectious individuals. However, the value of such actions depends on how the epidemic progresses. Few analyses of behavior change to date have accounted for how changes in behavior change the epidemic wave. In this paper, I calculate the tradeoff between daily social distancing behavior and reductions in infection risk now and in the future. The subsequent analysis shows that, for the parameters and functional forms studied, social distancing is most useful for moderately transmissible diseases. Social distancing is particularly useful when it is inexpensive and can delay the epidemic until a vaccine becomes widely available. However, the benefits of social distancing are small for highly transmissible diseases when no vaccine is available. JF - PLOS Computational Biology JA - PLOS Computational Biology VL - 6 IS - 5 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000793 SP - e1000793 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000793 ER -