This paper considers a model of infectious disease, such as swine flu, in which privately costly treatment confers immunity on recovered individuals. It is shown that under decentralized decision making, infected individuals ignore the externality that their treatment has on susceptible...

This paper studies a model of disease propagation in which agents can control their exposure to infection by engaging in costly preventive behavior. Agents are assumed to be fully rational, strategically sophisticated and forward-looking. I show that on the transition path, optimal behavior is...

This paper fully characterizes the optimal control of a recurrent infectious disease through the use of (non-vaccine) prevention and treatment. The dynamic system may admit multiple steady states and the optimal policy may be path dependent. We find that an optimal path cannot end at a point...