Modelling on Infectious Disease with Voluntary Vaccination Behavior on Social Networks by Evolutionary Game Theory and Multi-Agent Simulation

Abstract

This paper overviews how the author's group has been exploring on the decision-making process with social dilemma of individual vaccination, namely whether or not to be vaccinated, by means of the model of dynamics for epidemic spreading on a social network applied to evolutionary game theory. On underlying networks, both epidemic and information of agent's strategy are transferred, where the former is modeled by SIR and the latter is emulated as a spatial evolutionary game. Simulation results imply that both the vaccination acceptance fraction and final epidemic size are significantly affected by how strategy updating happens; namely whether he/ she copying from a neighbor or imitating a social trend, and underlying network topologies. The study poses one example of how the social physics helps to understand complex phenomenon taking place in a real world.