Co-evolution of Vaccination Behavior and Perceived Vaccination Risk can lead to a Stag-Hunt like Game

Abstract: Voluntary vaccination is effective to prevent infectious diseases from spreading. Both vaccination behavior and cognition of the vaccination risk play important roles in individual vaccination decision making. However, it is not clear how the co-evolution of the two shapes the population-wide vaccination behavior. We establish a coupled dynamics of epidemic, vaccination behavior and perceived vaccination risk with three different time scales. We assume that the increase of vaccination level inhibits the rise of perceived vaccination risk, and the increase of perceived vaccination risk inhibits the rise of vaccination level. It is shown that the resulting vaccination behavior is similar to the stag-hunt game, provided that the basic reproductive ratio is moderate and that the epidemic dynamics evolves fast. This is in contrast with the previous view that vaccination is a snowdrift like game. Furthermore, we find that epidemic breaks out repeatedly and eventually leads to vaccine scares if these three dynamics evolve on a similar time scale. And we propose some ways to promote vaccination behavior, such as controlling side-effect bias and perceived vaccination costs. Our work sheds light on epidemic control via vaccination by taking into account the co-evolutionary dynamics of cognition and behavior.