Exploring voluntary vaccination with bounded rationality through reinforcement learning

Benyun Shi, Guangliang Liu, Hongjun Qiu, Zhen Wang, Yizhi Ren and Dan Chen

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2019, vol. 515, issue C, 171-182

Abstract: Evidence shows that there exists a complex interaction between human vaccinating behaviors and disease prevalence during an epidemic. Usually, rational individuals make vaccinating decisions by strategically evaluating the cost of vaccination and the risk of infection. While in reality, individuals’ decisions can also be influenced by their social acquaintances. In this paper, we present a reinforcement learning-based mechanism to characterize human decision-making process with bounded rationality, which takes into consideration both individuals’ rational decisions and social influence from their neighbors. Specifically, we investigate human voluntary vaccinating behaviors in the face of flu-like seasonal diseases in locally-mixed social networks, where each individual together with his/her neighbors forms a well-mixed environment. Through carrying out simulations, we evaluate the performance of decision-making mechanisms with/without reinforcement learning in terms of vaccine coverage, final epidemic size, average payoff and vaccine effectiveness under different settings of relative cost of vaccination and infection. Simulation results show that reinforcement learning can improve the vaccine effectiveness through balancing individuals’ rationality and social influence. This emphasizes the importance of appropriately utilizing human bounded rationality in preventing disease epidemics through voluntary vaccination policies.

Keywords: Voluntary vaccination; Bounded rationality; Social influence; Reinforcement learning; Disease epidemics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437118312664
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

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:eee:phsmap:v:515:y:2019:i:c:p:171-182

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2018.09.151

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().