Beyond the Surface of Digital Contact Tracing: Delving into the Interconnected World of Technology, Individuals, and Society

Information-enabled technology, such as digital contact tracing (DCT), is designed to assist decision-making. However, during the pandemic, DCT also contributes additional factors to consider for individuals and policymakers. In this article, we conceptualise the interactions between individuals and policymakers and propose a leader-followers mean-field Game model to analyse their decision-making processes by integrating key factors, such as individuals’ health state, self-control effort, privacy, and social activities, under the influence of interventions and subsidies from policymakers. The simulation demonstrates that moderate subsidies are sufficient to induce early control efforts and higher collective efforts even with privacy concerns and the negative influence of engaging activities; Equilibrium and system stability can be reached when healthy or the summation of healthy and mediocre healthy populations dominates; The model highlights the crucial elements for future data analysis and collection, such as DCT is vital to indicate population health states.