Planning horizon affects prophylactic decision-making and epidemic dynamics

Human behavior can change the spread of infectious disease. There is limited understanding of how the time in the future over which individuals make a behavioral decision, their planning horizon, affects epidemic dynamics. We developed an agent-based model (along with an ODE analog) to explore the decision-making of self-interested individuals on adopting prophylactic behavior. The decision-making process incorporates prophylaxis efficacy and disease prevalence with individuals' payoffs and planning horizon. Our results show that for short and long planning horizons individuals do not consider engaging in prophylactic behavior. In contrast, individuals adopt prophylactic behavior when consid