Collaborative Research: Modeling and Behavioral Evaluation of Social Dynamics in Prevention Decisions

如果疫苗接种是自愿的，则疫苗接种决定由个人做出。总体来说，个人的决定决定了人群的免疫水平，而这反过来又影响了个人的疫苗接种决定的效用。虽然儿童是流感传播的主要原因，但与此相关的发病率和死亡率最高的是老年人。因此，分配给儿童的疫苗对人口的效用比对儿童本身的效用更大，从而产生了一种社会困境。对个人来说，是否接种疫苗的效用还取决于两个主要的不确定性来源。首先，疾病传播的概率性质存在固有的不确定性。其次，其他人的决定给系统带来了另一种程度的不确定性。个人的疫苗接种决定会影响人群中其他人感染的可能性。同时，接种疫苗对个人的重要性取决于其他人做出的接种决定。同样，一个国家为疾病监测提供资金的决定也会影响其他国家爆发疫情的可能性。此外，监视对单个国家的重要性取决于其他国家的监视决定。我们将综合个人、人口和全球视角的成果。在个人规模方面，将进行问卷调查和实验游戏研究，以考察个人的疫苗接种决定如何受到其他人的决定的影响，并估计利他主义对决定的潜在贡献。结合个人和人口规模，我们将整合流感流行病学模型和特定年龄段疫苗需求的博弈论模型。我们的心理数据将被用来开发我们的模型并验证其预测。在全球范围内，我们将评估疾病持续存在所固有的概率与向国际社会作出认真报告的决策之间的关系。用我们的跨学科方法综合这三种分析尺度将阐明生物疾病系统和人类社会决策过程之间的相互作用所产生的动态。这种跨学科的方法将数学建模与心理数据收集、经济学与流行病学、个人决策与人口水平的公共卫生结果相结合。

When vaccination is voluntary, vaccination decisions are made by individuals. Collectively, individual decisions determine the level of population immunity, which in turn affects the utility of vaccination decisions for the individual. While children are responsible for the majority of influenza transmission, it is the elderly that suffer the most associated morbidity and mortality. Consequently, the utility of vaccine allocation to children is greater for the population than it is for the children themselves, generating a type of social dilemma. The utility to an individual of whether or not to vaccinate also depends on two principal sources of uncertainty. First, there is uncertainty inherent in the probabilistic nature of disease transmission. Second, the decisions of others introduce another level of uncertainty into the system. An individual's vaccination decision affects the likelihood of infection for others in the population. At the same time, the importance of vaccination to the individual depends on the vaccination decisions made by others. In an analogous way, a country's decision to fund disease surveillance affects the likelihood of outbreaks for other countries. In addition, the importance of surveillance to an individual country depends on the surveillance decisions of others. We will integrate results from individual, population and global perspectives. On an individual scale, questionnaire and experimental game studies will be conducted to examine how an individual's vaccination decisions are influenced by the decisions of others, and to estimate the potential contribution of altruism to decisions. Combining individual and population scales, we will integrate a model of influenza epidemiology with a game-theoretic model of age-specific vaccine demand. Our psychological data will be used to develop our model and to verify its predictions. On a global scale, we will evaluate the relationship between the probabilities intrinsic to disease persistence, and decision making about conscientious reporting to the international community. The synthesis of these three scales of analysis with our interdisciplinary approach will illuminate the dynamics arising from the interplay between a biological disease system and human social decision processes. This interdisciplinary approach combines mathematical modeling with psychological data collection, economics with epidemiology, and individual decision making with population-level public health outcomes.