Impact of committed individuals on vaccination behavior

Abstract

We study how the presence of committed vaccinators, a small fraction of individuals who consistently hold the vaccinating strategy and are immune to influence, impact the vaccination dynamics in well-mixed and spatially structured populations. For this purpose, we develop an epidemiological game-theoretic model of a flu-like vaccination by integrating an epidemiological process into a simple agent-based model of adaptive learning, where individuals (except for those committed ones) use anecdotal evidence to estimate costs and benefits of vaccination. We show that the committed vaccinators, acting as "steadfast role models" in the populations, can efficiently avoid the clustering of susceptible individuals and stimulate other imitators to take vaccination, hence contributing to the promotion of vaccine uptake. We substantiate our findings by making comparative studies of our model on a full lattice and on a randomly diluted one. Our work is expected to provide valuable information for decision-making and design more effective disease-control strategy.