Game-Theoretic Approach to Modeling Collective Labor Incentives for Regional Civil Servants in Russia

Currently, a number of external factors (in particular, sanctions pressure from the US and EU countries, the pandemic of a new coronavirus infection) have a strong negative impact on the socio-economic development of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation. Therefore, the head of almost any Russian region is forced to perform the functions of an anti-crisis manager. The modern system of stimulating the work of civil regional employees can help improve the efficiency of public administration, and as a result, ensure the socio-economic development of a constituent entity of the Russian Federation. The author's approach to this issue is based on the simultaneous application of a number of modern scientific methods, namely index, neural network technologies and mathematical game theory. The use of neural network technologies makes it possible to objectively assess the achieved level of socio-economic development of a constituent entity of the Russian Federation. Taking into account the positive foreign (Singapore and South Korean) experience in the field of civil service reform, it is proposed to make the amount of collective incentive payments (bonus fund) of regional civil servants directly dependent on the achieved level of socio-economic development of the subject of the Russian Federation. In turn, this implies the development of a hierarchical system of collective-individual stimulation of the work of regional civil servants. During the construction of the game-theoretic model, the correct establishment of the relationship between the level of collective incentive payments to regional civil servants and the socio-economic development of a constituent entity of the Russian Federation is ensured. After experimental refinement of the parameters of the game-theoretic model, there is a possibility of its practical application to stimulate the work of regional civil servants in Russia. The introduction of the author's approach into the practice of regional management, firstly, will allow coordinating the activities of ministries and departments, and secondly, will strengthen control over the targeted spending of budgetary funds on bonus payments to civil civil servants.

Individual Altruism Cannot Overcome Congestion Effects in a Global Pandemic Game

A key challenge in responding to public health crises such as COVID-19 is the difficulty of predicting the results of feedback interconnections between the disease and society. As a step towards understanding these interconnections, we pose a simple game-theoretic model of a global pandemic in which individuals can choose where to live, and we investigate the global behavior that may emerge as a result of individuals reacting locally to the competing costs of isolation and infection. We study the game-theoretic equilibria that emerge from this setup when the population is composed of either selfish or altruistic individuals. First, we demonstrate that as is typical in these types of games, selfish equilibria are in general not optimal, but that all stable selfish equilibria are within a constant factor of optimal. Second, there exist infinitely-many stable altruistic equilibria;all but finitely-many of these are worse than the worst selfish equilibrium, and the social cost of altruistic equilibria is unbounded. Our work is in sharp contrast to recent work in network congestion games in which all altruistic equilibria are socially optimal. This suggests that a population without central coordination may react very poorly to a pandemic, and that individual altruism could even exacerbate the problem. © 2022 IEEE.

Mask or No Mask during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Game-Theoretic Approach

Wearing a mask as one of the crucial non-pharmaceutical interventions has demonstrated to be effective in the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. The implementation of face coverings for the public remains controversial and still faces some challenges. Whether or not to wear the mask could be a complex decision-making processing, involving the trade-offs between self-interest and collective interest among multiple stakeholders. In the literature, there is a lack of quantitative analysis for strategic mask-wearing decisions during the pandemic. This paper fills the gap by studying a game-theoretic model on wearing the mask considering conflicting interests. Using a susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model, we consider the players as either susceptible or infectious, characterized by homogeneous preferences within the group but heterogeneous preferences between groups. Then we propose a game-theoretic framework to model how both susceptible and infectious players make their decisions. We implement one-way sensitivity analyses to examine how the equilibrium solutions are sensitive to changes in the model parameters. The proposed game model shows that susceptible player is more likely to wear face masks compared to infectious player, when the likelihood or the cost of infection is large. Decreasing the cost of wearing masks or increasing the mask efficacy could help mitigate the reluctance of mask wearing. This paper provides insights on population mask-wearing behaviors, which can support policy makers to design regulations and incentives. © 2022 IISE Annual Conference and Expo 2022. All rights reserved.