Priority individual identification for vaccination promotion through evolutionary game of mixed populations

Abstract

Vaccines have saved people from the panic of infectious diseases. However, vaccine hesitation caused by vaccination risks makes vaccination a dilemma. Given the differences in the sensitivity of individuals to payoffs, this work analyzes the vaccination dilemma in mixed populations comprising conformity and rational individuals and explore the reasons for the groups to maintain cooperation. A cooperative environment is essential for maintaining cooperative behavior, as indicated by an analysis of adaptive strategies. Spurred by these findings, we propose the circle centrality concept that measures the ability of individuals to maintain strategies within a mixed-type populations. Moreover, this work proposes a budget-conscious algorithm to identify influential individuals in mixed populations for vaccination prioritization, using circle centrality as the criteria. This approach takes into account financial constraints of the funds available. The results demonstrate that prioritizing individuals based on circle centrality using our proposed method is more effective than random investment (RI) in promoting vaccine acceptance of the population and overcoming vaccine hesitancy. Simulation results on both synthetic and real-world networks support this finding. This work has implications for early vaccination campaigns in cash-strapped sectors during short-term outbreaks such as COVID-19.