IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0028300.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Health Newscasts for Increasing Influenza Vaccination Coverage: An Inductive Reasoning Game Approach

Author

Listed:
  • Romulus Breban

Abstract

Both pandemic and seasonal influenza are receiving more attention from mass media than ever before. Topics such as epidemic severity and vaccination are changing the way in which we perceive the utility of disease prevention. Voluntary influenza vaccination has been recently modeled using inductive reasoning games. It has thus been found that severe epidemics may occur because individuals do not vaccinate and, instead, attempt to benefit from the immunity of their peers. Such epidemics could be prevented by voluntary vaccination if incentives were offered. However, a key assumption has been that individuals make vaccination decisions based on whether there was an epidemic each influenza season; no other epidemiological information is available to them. In this work, we relax this assumption and investigate the consequences of making more informed vaccination decisions while no incentives are offered. We obtain three major results. First, individuals will not cooperate enough to constantly prevent influenza epidemics through voluntary vaccination no matter how much they learned about influenza epidemiology. Second, broadcasting epidemiological information richer than whether an epidemic occurred may stabilize the vaccination coverage and suppress severe influenza epidemics. Third, the stable vaccination coverage follows the trend of the perceived benefit of vaccination. However, increasing the amount of epidemiological information released to the public may either increase or decrease the perceived benefit of vaccination. We discuss three scenarios where individuals know, in addition to whether there was an epidemic, (i) the incidence, (ii) the vaccination coverage and (iii) both the incidence and the vaccination coverage, every influenza season. We show that broadcasting both the incidence and the vaccination coverage could yield either better or worse vaccination coverage than broadcasting each piece of information on its own.

Suggested Citation

  • Romulus Breban, 2011. "Health Newscasts for Increasing Influenza Vaccination Coverage: An Inductive Reasoning Game Approach," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 6(12), pages 1-10, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0028300
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0028300
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0028300
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0028300&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0028300?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Arthur, W Brian, 1994. "Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 84(2), pages 406-411, May.
    2. Daniel M Cornforth & Timothy C Reluga & Eunha Shim & Chris T Bauch & Alison P Galvani & Lauren Ancel Meyers, 2011. "Erratic Flu Vaccination Emerges from Short-Sighted Behavior in Contact Networks," PLOS Computational Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(1), pages 1-10, January.
    3. W. Brian Arthur, 1994. "Inductive Reasoning, Bounded Rationality and the Bar Problem," Working Papers 94-03-014, Santa Fe Institute.
    4. Neil M. Ferguson & Derek A.T. Cummings & Simon Cauchemez & Christophe Fraser & Steven Riley & Aronrag Meeyai & Sopon Iamsirithaworn & Donald S. Burke, 2005. "Strategies for containing an emerging influenza pandemic in Southeast Asia," Nature, Nature, vol. 437(7056), pages 209-214, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Zou, Rongcheng & Duan, Xiaofang & Han, Zhen & Lu, Yikang & Ma, Kewei, 2023. "What information sources can prevent the epidemic: Local information or kin information?," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 168(C).
    2. Nunner, Hendrik & Buskens, Vincent & Teslya, Alexandra & Kretzschmar, Mirjam, 2022. "Health behavior homophily can mitigate the spread of infectious diseases in small-world networks," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 312(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Maria Minniti & William Bygrave, 2001. "A Dynamic Model of Entrepreneurial Learning," Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, , vol. 25(3), pages 5-16, April.
    2. Bell, Peter N, 2013. "New Testing Procedures to Assess Market Efficiency with Trading Rules," MPRA Paper 46701, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Luis Alfonso Dau & Aya S. Chacar & Marjorie A. Lyles & Jiatao Li, 2022. "Informal institutions and international business: Toward an integrative research agenda," Journal of International Business Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Academy of International Business, vol. 53(6), pages 985-1010, August.
    4. Giuseppe Pernagallo & Benedetto Torrisi, 2020. "A theory of information overload applied to perfectly efficient financial markets," Review of Behavioral Finance, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 14(2), pages 223-236, October.
    5. Sergeeva, Anastasia & Bhardwaj, Akhil & Dimov, Dimo, 2021. "In the heat of the game: Analogical abduction in a pragmatist account of entrepreneurial reasoning," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 36(6).
    6. Ciarli, Tommaso & Ràfols, Ismael, 2019. "The relation between research priorities and societal demands: The case of rice," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 48(4), pages 949-967.
    7. Wawrzyniak, Karol & Wiślicki, Wojciech, 2012. "Mesoscopic approach to minority games in herd regime," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 391(5), pages 2056-2082.
    8. Scott C. Linn & Nicholas S. P. Tay, 2007. "Complexity and the Character of Stock Returns: Empirical Evidence and a Model of Asset Prices Based on Complex Investor Learning," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 53(7), pages 1165-1180, July.
    9. Alan Kirman & François Laisney & Paul Pezanis-Christou, 2023. "Relaxing the symmetry assumption in participation games: a specification test for cluster-heterogeneity," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 26(4), pages 850-878, September.
    10. Andrew W. Bausch, 2014. "Evolving intergroup cooperation," Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, Springer, vol. 20(4), pages 369-393, December.
    11. Agnieszka Wiszniewska-Matyszkiel, 2016. "Belief distorted Nash equilibria: introduction of a new kind of equilibrium in dynamic games with distorted information," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 243(1), pages 147-177, August.
    12. Challet, Damien & Zhang, Yi-Cheng, 1998. "On the minority game: Analytical and numerical studies," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 256(3), pages 514-532.
    13. Gu, Gao-Feng & Chen, Wei & Zhou, Wei-Xing, 2008. "Empirical regularities of order placement in the Chinese stock market," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 387(13), pages 3173-3182.
    14. Gian Italo Bischi & Ugo Merlone, 2017. "Evolutionary minority games with memory," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 27(5), pages 859-875, November.
    15. Salle, Isabelle & Yildizoglu, Murat & Zumpe, Martin & Sénégas, Marc-Alexandre, 2017. "Coordination through social learning in a general equilibrium model," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 141(C), pages 64-82.
    16. Tanimoto, Jun & Nakamura, Kousuke, 2016. "Social dilemma structure hidden behind traffic flow with route selection," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 459(C), pages 92-99.
    17. Benjamin Patrick Evans & Mikhail Prokopenko, 2021. "Bounded rationality for relaxing best response and mutual consistency: The Quantal Hierarchy model of decision-making," Papers 2106.15844, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2023.
    18. Linde, Jona & Sonnemans, Joep & Tuinstra, Jan, 2014. "Strategies and evolution in the minority game: A multi-round strategy experiment," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 86(C), pages 77-95.
    19. Mello, Bernardo A. & Cajueiro, Daniel O., 2008. "Minority games, diversity, cooperativity and the concept of intelligence," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 387(2), pages 557-566.
    20. Claudius Graebner & Jakob Kapeller, 2015. "The Micro-Macro Link in Heterodox Economics," ICAE Working Papers 37, Johannes Kepler University, Institute for Comprehensive Analysis of the Economy.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0028300. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.