Perception Effect in Evolutionary Vaccination Game Under Prospect-Theoretic Approach

Vaccination is one of the most effective strategies against epidemics. Traditionally, the evolutionary game theory focuses on individual behaviors, rather than psychological cognition behind which reflects individual risk attitude. How does individual perception impact the collective decision and performance of vaccination? To explore this question, we propose an evolutionary vaccination game model by integrating the prospect theory (PT), which accounts for individual subjective perception under uncertainty. In this article, the uncertainty stems from the interactions of individuals in the potential infection process. After analyzing the evolutionary vaccination dynamics, we compare the vaccination equilibrium under the PT and the expected utility theory (EUT) and highlight the role of perceptions on promoting vaccination. In addition, we find that the performance of different perceptions captured by the weighting effect (WE) and the framing effect in epidemic control depends on the vaccination cost. Specifically, both the fraction of infected individuals and the social cost decrease with the decrease of the rationality coefficient under the WE when the vaccination cost is relatively small. The dependence reveals that risk-averse and loss aversion dominate individual vaccination behavior. The numerical simulations verify the effect of perception and the effectiveness of vaccinating the network epidemics.