ArticleBulletin of mathematical biology2025
Phase Boundaries and Critical Transitions in Coupled Epidemic-Behavioral Systems.
Article in Bulletin of mathematical biology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Epidemics are nonlinear adaptive processes in which pathogen spread and human behavior form a tightly coupled feedback loop. Individual decisions about protective measures create strategic interactions. These interactions can either accelerate disease spread or drive collective suppression. We introduce a theoretical lattice-based agent model that fuses SIS contagion with an evolutionary game, systematically exploring how strategy choice and infection pressure co-evolve through comprehensive parameter space analysis. Agents choose between self-isolation and normal activity based on population-wide disease prevalence and perceived costs. Agents then update strategies using a Fermi rule based on global infection prevalence and perceived costs. Infections propagate through contact-based transmission with behavior-dependent probability. We model transmission with a hierarchical probability structure where cross-infection coupling captures risk at behavioral interfaces between strategies. Comprehensive exploration of the four-dimensional parameter space reveals sharp phase transitions between cooperative and defective regimes. These transitions are governed by transmission intensity, recovery probability, risk perception, and economic pressures. A striking paradox emerges: while intense cross-infection coupling drives near-universal isolation adoption, it paradoxically sustains persistent endemic infection, demonstrating that widespread cooperation does not guarantee epidemic control. Modest changes in isolation costs or cross-infection coupling trigger complete phase inversions. This extreme sensitivity characterizes systems operating near critical points. Contact-mediated spread generates persistent spatial patterning in infection status and compartment composition. These findings establish epidemic-behavioral coupling as a fundamentally nonlinear dynamical system exhibiting critical phenomena and emergent spatial organization. Cooperation emergence does not guarantee epidemic control, revealing complex theoretical relationships between individual decision-making and collective health outcomes that require empirical validation for practical application.
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