Social imitation dynamics of vaccination driven by vaccine effectiveness and beliefs
Fig 2
Bistability of equilibrium vaccination levels and the emergence of hysteresis loops in well-mixed populations.
We simulate the social imitation of vaccination dynamics in a finite, well-mixed population and obtain hysteresis loops, composed of the ascending and descending paths, in response to variations to model parameters: ( A) the relative cost of vaccination, c, and ( B) vaccine effectiveness, ε. The population can exhibit bistability within certain ranges of the model parameters c and ε. Stochastic agent-based simulation results align with theoretical analysis, with noticeable discrepancies attributable to finite population effects. Parameters: population size N = 1000, infection seeds I0 = 10. For the first simulation, the initial number of vaccinated individuals is . For subsequent simulations, the results of the preceding simulations are used as the initial conditions, while the model parameters are varied in a prescribed sequence of increasing and then decreasing values. Disease transmission rate
, recovery rate
, intensity of selection K = 1. (A) effectiveness
, (B) c = 0.35. Simulation results are averaged over 100 independent runs.