A Game Theoretical Approach for Hospital Stockpile in Preparation for Pandemics

This paper explores the problem of medical stockpiling at hospitals in preparing for a flu pandemic. Taking into account the uncertain demand that may occur under various possible pandemic scenarios, we consider the problem of determining the stockpile quantity of one critical medical item. We take a game theoretical approach in order to capture any mutual aid agreement that a group of hospitals may have, and its impact on the stockpile decisions made. The existence of a Nash equilibrium will be examined and discussion of how to evaluate it will be presented.