Imitation dynamics of vaccination behaviour on social networks

By Feng Fu, Daniel I. S. Rosenbloom, Long Wang, Martin A. Nowak. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences, 2011

443 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The problem of achieving widespread immunity to infectious diseases by voluntary vaccination is often presented as a public-goods dilemma, as an individual's vaccination contributes to herd immunity, protecting those who forgo vaccination. The temptation to free-ride brings the equilibrium vaccination level below the social optimum. Here, we present an evolutionary game-theoretic approach to this problem, exploring the roles of individual imitation behaviour and population structure in vaccination. To this end, we integrate an epidemiological process into a simple agent-based model of adaptive learning, where individuals use anecdotal evidence to estimate costs and benefits of vaccination. In our simulations, we focus on parameter values that are realistic for a flu-like infection. Paradoxically, as agents become more adept at imitating successful strategies, the equilibrium level of vaccination falls below the rational individual optimum. In structured populations, the picture is only somewhat more optimistic: vaccination is widespread over a range of low vaccination costs, but coverage plummets after cost exceeds a critical threshold. This result suggests parallels to historical scenarios in which vaccination coverage provided herd immunity for some time, but then rapidly dropped. Our work sheds light on how imitation of peers shapes individual vaccination choices in social networks.

Subfields: Genetics, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/917b7f1f6afadd07193f9492e7ec2291fc5a5d2b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Genetics

In Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Statistical physics of vaccination (2016, background): “Interestingly, compared with the classical version of the model [433], the “double-edged sword” effect occurs again.”
The structure and dynamics of multilayer networks (2014, background): “[280] it is found that the spatial population structure shows a ‘‘double-edged sword’’ effect, which fosters vaccine uptake at the low cost of vaccination, but causes vaccination to plummet when the cost goes beyond a certain threshold.”
Coupled disease–behavior dynamics on complex networks: A review (2015, background): “[85], where the SIR epidemic spreading process and the strategy updating process succeed alternatively.”