Behaviorally Informed Strategies for Infectious Disease Mitigation: Balancing Incentives and Screening

Although vaccination and routine screening are indispensable for infectious disease mitigation, vaccine hesitancy poses a critical challenge to their effectiveness. Considering a community (e.g., university) setting, we study mitigation strategies that utilize monetary vaccination incentives and routine screening for the unvaccinated, leveraging screening’s dual role as mitigation tool and nonmonetary incentive via testing exemption. We develop an integrated optimization and learning framework, with a utility-based vaccination model capturing behavioral heterogeneity, under uncertainty and resource constraints. We characterize structural properties of Pareto strategies and their dependence on community and epidemiological parameters. Notably, under budget constraints, monetary incentives and screening may act as complements rather than substitutes; overlooking screening’s incentivizing effect could result in inferior strategies. We embed the mitigation optimization within a logistic growth model, directly linking decisions to epidemiological outcomes. A case study grounded in realistic epidemiological data, together with a medically detailed compartmental model that extends beyond the analytical framework’s assumptions, demonstrates that adaptive blending of incentives and screening can substantially outperform commonly used benchmarks in both health outcomes and budget adherence. Our findings underscore the importance of tailoring mitigation to community characteristics, incorporating the incentive effect of routine screening, and leveraging real-time vaccination data and adaptive screening in strategy development.

Supplemental Material: All supplemental materials, including the code, data, and files required to reproduce the results, are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2024.0942.