Mechanism design for pandemics

Stockpiling Ventilators for Influenza Pandemics

Stockpiling Ventilators for Influenza Pandemics

In preparing for influenza pandemics, public health agencies stockpile critical medical resources. Determining appropriate quantities and locations for such resources can be challenging, given the considerable uncertainty in the timing and severity of future pandemics. We introduce a method for optimizing stockpiles of mechanical ventilators, which are critical for treating hospitalized influen...

Mechanism Design for Scheduling

We consider mechanism design issues for scheduling problems and we survey some recent developments on this important problem in Algorithmic Game Theory. We treat both the related and the unrelated version of the problem. 1 The scheduling problem The problem of scheduling unrelated machines [21, 14] is one of the most fundamental algorithmic problems: There are n machines and m tasks∗ and machin...

Journals, Academics, and Pandemics

Two articles published recently in PLoS Medicine highlight the problem of how to effectively share information in the wake of a rapidly spreading disease, and prompted us to ask the question ''How well are journals doing?'' with regard to this important goal. The answer, sadly, seems to be ''not well enough.'' Although the potential of the Internet for improving the dissemination of information...

Pandemics and National Security

Traditionally, national security has been narrowly defined as the preservation of the state from physical threats. Still, emerging diseases and their pandemic potential pose perhaps an even greater national security threat, particularly in this era of globalization when disease can spread more rapidly than in previous eras. Thirty four percent of all deaths worldwide are now attributable to inf...