{"ID":23474983,"CreatedAt":"2026-09-18T01:09:05.407443952Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-09-20T18:11:56.143995915Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19641","arxiv_id":"2609.19641","title":"Epidemic Control using Stackelberg Mean Field Game with Budget Constraint","abstract":"Epidemic mitigation comes with a price in practice, and when budget is limited, its effective allocation becomes an important question on public policy. In this paper, we study epidemic control through a Stackelberg mean-field game in which a principal, representing the government, chooses social distancing guidelines and vaccination levels for a large population of rational minor agents subject to a budget-spending process. The principal anticipates the minor agents mean-field Nash equilibrium (MFNE) and selects intervention policies to minimize her own objective, inducing a bi-level optimal control problem. We define the Stackelberg mean-field game equilibrium (SMFE) and give its necessary condition by a forward-backward ordinary differential equation (FBODE) system, and provide existence and uniqueness results. We further propose an iterative fixed-point algorithm to solve the FBODE numerically and present computational observations that illustrate the resulting equilibrium behavior.","short_abstract":"Epidemic mitigation comes with a price in practice, and when budget is limited, its effective allocation becomes an important question on public policy. In this paper, we study epidemic control through a Stackelberg mean-field game in which a principal, representing the government, chooses social distancing guidelines...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19641","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.19641v1","authors":"[\"Huaning Liu\",\"Gokce Dayanikli\"]","published":"2026-09-17T03:31:18Z","proceeding":"math.OC","tasks":"[\"math.OC\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}