Modeling and investigating the dilemma of early and delayed vaccination driven by the dynamics of imitation and aspiration

Abstract

This study aims to evaluate mankind’s vaccination behavior for two alternative vaccines through the incorporation of imitation and aspiration dynamics in an existing setup of the mean-field approximation. Individuals may be immunized in advance of an outbreak to prevent infection. However, due to the immunization’s imperfections, expense, or people’s reluctance to get immunized, a number of individuals might opt to be immunized later. Our model can simulate two scenarios of social conundrums, one caused by early vaccination and operating on a global time scale. The other is driven by delayed vaccination and working on a local time scale. The epidemic scenario gets worse as the strategy updating interval gets longer. This work provides a comparative analysis between the dynamics of imitation and aspiration. We integrate the imitation dynamics with various cost and efficacy variations of these vaccines. Then, we demonstrate the impact of symmetric and asymmetric level of expectations for both vaccines on aspiration dynamics. The symmetric expectations for both vaccines continue to have a negative relationship with their cost and a positive association with the efficacy of the vaccines. If one of the vaccines is more expensive, the consumer may opt for another. However, fewer aspiration for the early vaccine can improve the total vaccine coverage and hence help to limit epidemic disease in the case of an asymmetric degree of aspiration for the early-delayed vaccination model.