Market-based control of epidemics

We consider a single profit-maximizer healing or health-care provider that administers treatment to infective nodes during an epidemic outbreak in a homogeneous network. We derive the dynamic optimal policies of the provider for two cases: (a) when infective nodes gain permanent immunity upon treatment (SIRD model), and (b) when treated nodes are again susceptible to future re-infection (SIS model). We show that in the case of the SIRD model the optimal policy is to defer provision of healing until an infection threshold is reached and then to provide healing with maximum intensity. In the case of the SIS model the optimal policy is a Most-Rapid-Approach-Path (MRAP) to an intermediate density of infection.