Sociophysics Approach to Epidemics

This book presents the fundamentals of evolutionary game theory and applies them to the analysis of epidemics, which is of paramount importance in the aftermath of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. The primary objective of this monograph is to deliver a powerful tool to model and analyze the spread of an infectious disease during a pandemic as well as the human decision dynamics. The book employs a variant of the “vaccination game,” in which a mathematical epidemiological model dovetails with evolutionary game theory. From a social physics standpoint, this book introduces an extended concept of the vaccination game starting from the fundamental issues and touching on the newest practical applications.

The book first outlines the fundamental basis of evolutionary game theory, in which a two-player and two-strategy game, the so-called 2 × 2 game, and a multi-player game are concisely introduced, and the important issue of how social dilemmas are quantified is highlighted.

Subsequently, the book discusses various recent applications of the extended concept of the vaccination game so as to quantitatively evaluate provisions other than vaccination, including practical intermediate protective measures such as mask-wearing, efficiency of quarantine compared with that of isolation policies for suppressing epidemics, efficiency of preemptive versus late vaccination, and optimal subsidy policies for vaccination.

The author was born in 1965 in Fukuoka but he grew up in Yokohama. He graduated in 1988 from the Department of Architecture, Undergraduate School of Science & Engineering at Waseda University. In 1990, he completed his master’s program, and in 1993, he earned his doctoral degree from Waseda University. He started his professional career as a Research Associate at Tokyo Metropolitan University in 1990, moved to Kyushu University and was promoted to Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) in 1995, and became Associate Professor in 1998. Since 2003 he has served as Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Urban Architectural Environmental Engineering. He served as a Visiting Professor at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), USA; at the University of New South Wales, Australia; at Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands; and at Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Germany. Professor Tanimoto has published numerous scientific papers in building physics, urban climatology, and statistical physics and is the author of books such as Evolutionary Games with Sociophysics: Analysis of Traffic Flow and Epidemics (Springer; ISBN: 978-981-13-2769-8), Fundamentals of Evolutionary Game Theory and its Applications (Springer; ISBN: 978-4-431-54961-1) and Mathematical Analysis of Environmental System (Springer; ISBN: 978-4-431-54621-4). He was a recipient of the Award of the Society of Heating, Air-Conditioning, and Sanitary Engineers of Japan (SHASE), the Fosterage Award from the Architectural Institute of Japan (AIJ), the Award of AIJ, and the IEEE CEC2009 Best Paper Award. He is involved in numerous activities worldwide, including editor at several international journals including Applied Mathematics & Computation, PLOS One and Journal of Building Performance Simulation, among others; committee member for many conferences; and expert at the IEA Solar Heating and Cooling Program Task 23. He is also an active painter and novelist, and has been awarded numerous prizes in fine art and literature. He has created many works of art and published several books. He specializes in scenic drawing with watercolors and romantic fiction.