The Impacts of Subsidy Policies on Vaccination Decisions in Contact Networks

Often, vaccination programs are carried out based on self-interest rather than being mandatory. Owing to the perceptions about risks associated with vaccines and the ‘herd immunity’ effect, it may provide suboptimal vaccination coverage for the population as a whole. In this case, some subsidy policies may be offered by the government to promote vaccination coverage. But, not all subsidy policies are effective in controlling the transmission of infectious diseases. We address the question of which subsidy policy is best, and how to appropriately distribute the limited subsidies to maximize vaccine coverage. To answer these questions, we establish a model based on evolutionary game theory, where individuals try to maximize their personal payoffs when considering the voluntary vaccination mechanism. Our model shows that voluntary vaccination alone is insufficient to control an epidemic. Hence, two subsidy policies are systematically studied: (1) in the free subsidy policy the total amount of subsidies is distributed to some individuals and all the donees may vaccinate at no cost, and (2) in the part-offset subsidy policy each vaccinated person is offset by a certain proportion of the vaccination cost. Simulations suggest that, since the partoffset subsidy policy can encourage more individuals to be vaccinated, the performance of this policy is significantly better than that of the free subsidy policy. Meanwhile, for the free subsidy policy, if the individuals with more neighbors are freely vaccinated with high priority rather than in a random manner, we find that the efficiency of this subsidy policy is remarkably improved. In addition, for the part-offset subsidy policy, we observe that too low or too high proportion of subsidy is not good for group-optimal vaccination given that the total amount of subsidies is restricted. Instead, moderate proportion of allowances can achieve the maximum of the social benefits. PACS numbers: 89.65.-s, 02.50.Le, 89.75.Fb, 87.23.Kg