Commuter-Augmented Urban Scaling of Infectious Disease Incidence
An extension of urban scaling that models a city's infectious-disease case count as a two-input production function of both population size and inter-city commuter flow (the weighted total degree in the commuting network), rather than population alone. Using Cobb-Douglas and translog forms, students learn to derive a per-city elasticity of scale that predicts decreasing, increasing, or even negative returns depending on the product of population and commuters, and to see why adding commuter connectivity reduces the bias that population-only scaling shows in large cities.
Impact of inter-city interactions on disease scaling Nathalia A. Loureiro1, Camilo R. Neto1, Jack
Traditional urban scaling relates a city indicator Y to population N alone via a power law Y~N^beta, treating cities as isolated. This paper argues that inter-city interaction shapes disease spread a…