Economic epidemiology is a field at the intersection of epidemiology and economics. Its premise is to incorporate incentives for healthy behavior and their attendant behavioral responses into an epidemiological context to better understand how diseases are transmitted. This framework should help improve policy responses to epidemic diseases by giving policymakers and health-care providers clear tools for thinking about how certain actions can influence the spread of disease transmission.
The main context through which this field emerged was the idea of prevalence-dependence, or disinhibition, which suggests that individuals change their behavior as the prevalence of a disease changes. However, economic epidemiology also encompasses other ideas, including the role of externalities, global disease commons and how individuals’ incentives can influence the outcome and cost of health interventions.
Strategic epidemiology is a branch of economic epidemiology that adopts an explicitly game theoretic approach to analyzing the interplay between individual behavior and population wide disease dynamics.[citation needed]