Dresden 2011 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 14: Networks: From Topology to Dynamics II (with BP, DY)

SOE 14.2: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 16. März 2011, 11:00–11:15, GÖR 226

Vaccination Decisions with Limited Information — •Olivia Woolley Meza, Daniel Grady, and Dirk Brockmann — Northwestern University, Evanston, USA

Widely practiced vaccination can eradicate a disease from a population. However, if rational, self-interested individuals believe there is any risk associated with the vaccine, their strategic vaccination decisions can lead to insufficient aggregate vaccination. In fact, recent work has shown that in a well-mixed population with perfect information the disease will not be eradicated. We consider a finite-size stochastic system,where each individual has both a contact neighborhood, the group of others who can contact the individual, and an information neighborhood, the group of others about whom the individual can obtain information. We find that in this setting strategic vaccination decisions can lead to disease eradication. We further investigate how the likelihood of eradication changes with the extent of information on which individuals base their decisions. We find that when information is very limited, increasing the extent of information helps to eradicate the disease. However, as more information becomes available we find a second regime where additional information reduces the effectiveness of vaccination.The information region with high disease extinction is larger when the underlying topology is highly clustered. The cause of suboptimal behavior as we approach global information also depends on the underlying topology. We use simulations and analytical models to explain this behavior.