Simulating Percentage of Workers Opting to Work from Home During the COVID-19 Pandemic Using N-Player Iterative Game Theory

ABSTRACT

The outbreak of the COVID-19 virus has led to several countries establishing guidelines asking citizens to stay secluded and at their homes as much as possible. This has a profound impact on the working lives in almost all professions. Hence, people have been advised to work from home. However, working from home has several limitations and on average will cause financial losses to an individual. This has given rise to a dilemma where each person has the choice of working from home or going outside with the incentive of earning more capital but also increasing the risk of capturing the virus. We have modeled this situation using an n-player game where each player is trying to maximize their payoff, i.e., trying to make as much money as possible but limiting the risk of catching the virus. We aim to predict the proportion of a population cooperating, i.e., the following work from home guidelines at a particular stage of spread. This project presents an algorithm to model the n-player game and has used actual COVID-19 case numbers from various Indian states to simulate the situation. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.