Who should get vaccinated? Individualized allocation of vaccines over SIR network

Toru Kitagawa () and Guanyi Wang
Additional contact information
Toru Kitagawa: Institute for Fiscal Studies and University College London
Guanyi Wang: Institute for Fiscal Studies

No CWP28/21, CeMMAP working papers from Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice, Institute for Fiscal Studies

Abstract: How to allocate vaccines over heterogeneous individuals is one of the important policy decisions in pandemic times. This paper develops a procedure to estimate an individualized vaccine allocation policy under limited supply, exploiting social network data containing individual demographic characteristics and health status. We model the spillover effects of vaccination based on a Heterogeneous-Interacted-SIR network model and estimate an individualized vaccine allocation policy by maximizing an estimated social welfare (public health) criterion incorporating these spillovers. While this optimization problem is generally an NP-hard integer optimization problem, we show that the SIR structure leads to a submodular objective function, and provide a computationally attractive greedy algorithm for approximating a solution that has a theoretical performance guarantee. Moreover, we characterise a finite sample welfare regret bound and examine how its uniform convergence rate depends on the complexity and riskiness of the social network. In the simulation, we illustrate the importance of considering spillovers by comparing our method with targeting without network information.

Date: 2021-07-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cmp and nep-net
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cemmap.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/0 ... over-SIR-network.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ifs:cemmap:28/21

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
The Institute for Fiscal Studies 7 Ridgmount Street LONDON WC1E 7AE

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CeMMAP working papers from Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice, Institute for Fiscal Studies The Institute for Fiscal Studies 7 Ridgmount Street LONDON WC1E 7AE. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emma Hyman ().