Game Theory and Vaccines
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC516577/
This article ties in Game Theory to make sense of how fear of risk from vaccinations can lead to an eradication of a disease that can be preventable with a vaccination. It shows that using Game Theory analysis can help understand the decisions people make individually such as not vaccinating themselves which goes against the larger population’s best interests and how that can lead to either eradication of wide-spread disease or the exact opposite. In the article the researchers implement epidemic modeling to analyze the population’s behavior for voluntary vaccination policies for childhood diseases. A big few findings from the study include that vaccination decisions are strongly influenced by “incorrect risk perception” and it is very easy to vaccine uptake drop during vaccine scares and hard to restore uptake levels after the risk in the vaccine has been reduced and the vaccine has been reintroduced.
I think this article is very interesting way to look at terms that are often solely used in economics and how they can actually help authorities make decisions about protecting large populations from disease outbreak. Predicting people’s reactions and also knowing that there are still a lot of factors going into human decisions is something that is very important for protecting the larger population and the more accurate predictive results are the better. One very important and interesting connection to make is to another topic we talked about in class which are networks on social media. A big reason there is incorrect risk perception on vaccines is due to social media and how a lot of articles and views are easily and rapidly spread even if they are false. It is much more likely for a negative article to catch a person’s attention than a positive article and articles on disease scares and vaccination scares would be classified as “negative” and so be more to be spread.