Preferential imitation of vaccinating behavior can invalidate the targeted subsidy on complex network

TL;DR

This paper investigates how targeted vaccination subsidies on complex networks can be undermined by individual imitation behaviors, revealing that targeted strategies may sometimes worsen epidemic outcomes and identifying optimal subsidy levels for minimal social cost.

Contribution

It introduces a model analyzing the interaction between subsidy policies and individual imitation responses, highlighting conditions where targeted subsidies are ineffective or counterproductive.

Findings

Targeted subsidies are only effective when individuals imitate subsidized individuals.

Increasing subsidized individuals can increase epidemic size under targeted policies.

Optimal intermediate subsidy levels minimize social costs.

Abstract

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.