Economic epidemiology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Economic epidemiology is a field at the intersection of epidemiology and economics. Its premises it to explain health outcomes by incorporating individuals' incentives to health behaviors and accordingly their behavioral responses that influences disease transmission. Strategic epidemiology is a branch of economic epidemiology that adopts an explicitly game theoretic approach to analyzing the interplay between individual behavior and population wide disease dynamics.

[edit] Vaccination

Immunisation represents a classic case of a social dilemma: a conflict of interest between the private gains of individuals and the collective gains of a society. An individual's self-interest and choice often leads to a vaccination uptake rate less than the social optimum as individuals do not take into account the benefit to others.

[edit] References

• Philipson T: Economic epidemiology and infectious disease. In Handbook of Health Economics. Edited by: Cuyler AJ, Newhouse JP. Amsterdam: North Holland; 2000. OpenURL