Colloquium: Vaccination Decisions in Heterogeneous Populations

Speaker: Jan Rychtář, PhD., Professor of Mathematics,Virginia Commonwealth University

Abstract: Vaccination game theory typically assumes homogeneous populations. In this talk, we develop and solve a vaccination game for an infinite population of agents with non-homogeneous preferences. We assume that agents may vary in 1) how susceptible they are to the disease, 2) how they perceive the cost of the disease and the cost of the vaccination, and 3) how they perceive vaccine effectiveness. We encode this heterogeneity by a quantile function describing the distribution of the net relative vaccination cost and give. We derive an explicit formula for the Nash equilibrium of the game. We show how this theory can be applied to real-world data, and we compare our method to its homogeneous counterpart. We observe that overall, our method outperforms the homogeneous method; the difference in performance is especially striking when only a small number of survey results are available. Overall, our method is also more robust and provides smaller prediction errors.