Stochastic games of parental vaccination decision making and bounded rationality
Andras Balogh, Tamer Oraby

TL;DR
This paper models parental vaccination decisions using stochastic differential equations to account for bounded rationality and social influences, revealing complex dynamics and potential strategies to improve vaccination uptake.
Contribution
It introduces a novel stochastic differential equation framework combining SIR models with bounded rationality in parental decision-making.
Findings
Stochasticity causes new dynamic behaviors in vaccination decisions.
Bounded rationality influences the impact of social norms.
Optimal control strategies can mitigate bounded rationality effects.
Abstract
Vaccination is an effective strategy to prevent the spread of diseases. However, hesitancy and rejection of vaccines, particularly in childhood immunizations, pose challenges to vaccination efforts. In that case, according to rational decision-making and classical utility theory, parents weigh the costs of vaccination against the costs of not vaccinating their children. Social norms influence these parental decision-making outcomes, deviating their decisions from rationality. Additionally, variability in values of utilities stemming from stochasticity in parents' perceptions over time can lead to further deviations from rationality. In this paper, we employ independent white noises to represent stochastic fluctuations in parental perceptions of utility functions of the decisions over time, as well as in the disease transmission rates. This approach leads to a system of stochastic…
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Taxonomy
TopicsGame Theory and Applications
