Individual vaccination decision-making

Incorporate individual decision-making about vaccination into the continuous-time epidemic Stackelberg mean-field game, rather than modeling vaccination uptake as a decision made directly by the principal.

Background

The model treats vaccination as a control selected directly by the government so that the analysis can focus on allocating a limited budget between social distancing and vaccination. The authors explicitly identify replacing this assumption with individual vaccination decisions as an unresolved direction for extending the framework and representing behavioral responses more realistically.

References

Several interesting directions remain open for future work. First, regarding model formulation, we simplify individual vaccination uptake by treating it as a decision made directly by the principal, in order to focus on the allocation of budget between social distancing and vaccination. A natural extension is to incorporate individual decision-making on vaccination.

— Epidemic Control using Stackelberg Mean Field Game with Budget Constraint  (2609.19641 - Liu et al., 17 Sep 2026) in Section 5, Conclusions and Future Directions