1 research outputs found
Preferential imitation of vaccinating behavior can invalidate the targeted subsidy on complex network
We consider the effect of inducement to vaccinate during the spread of an
infectious disease on complex networks. Suppose that public resources are
finite and that only a small proportion of individuals can be vaccinated freely
(complete subsidy), for the remainder of the population vaccination is a
voluntary behavior --- and each vaccinated individual carries a perceived cost.
We ask whether the classical targeted subsidy strategy is definitely better
than the random strategy: does targeting subsidy at individuals perceived to be
with the greatest risk actually help? With these questions, we propose a model
to investigate the \emph{interaction effects} of the subsidy policies and
individuals responses when facing subsidy policies on the epidemic dynamics on
complex networks. In the model, a small proportion of individuals are freely
vaccinated according to either the targeted or random subsidy policy, the
remainder choose to vaccinate (or not) based on voluntary principle and update
their vaccination decision via an imitation rule. Our findings show that the
targeted strategy is only advantageous when individuals prefer to imitate the
subsidized individuals' strategy. Otherwise, the effect of the targeted policy
is worse than the random immunization, since individuals preferentially select
non-subsidized individuals as the imitation objects. More importantly, we find
that under the targeted subsidy policy, increasing the proportion of subsidized
individuals may increase the final epidemic size. We further define social cost
as the sum of the costs of vaccination and infection, and study how each of the
two policies affect the social cost. Our result shows that there exist some
optimal intermediate regions leading to the minimal social cost.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure