Cost of fairness in disease spread control

This article studies the cost of fairness in designing controls (allocating resources) to mitigate disease spread, in the context of canonical network models for spread. Specifically, the performance of an optimal design in terms of the reduction in spread rate is compared with that of a fair one: an algebraic bound on the difference in performance (or cost of fairness) is obtained, and this bound is further characterized in the case that the spread topology is specially structured (e.g., a regular or random graph).