The impact of preference selection based on influence in spatial evolutionary vaccination game

Understanding human behavioral decisions, such as vaccination, in the face of the epidemic outbreak, is particularly crucial for modeling the complex interactions between epidemic and human behavior. Evolutionary game theory provides a classical and fundamental framework to explore the interplay between epidemic spreading and imitation dynamics. However, most previous studies have concentrated on current game outcomes and assumed that individuals base their imitation decisions on these outcomes with no preference, ignoring the influence of historical experience and individual preference on behavioral decisions. Therefore, we define historical payoff as individual influence, and propose a preference selection mechanism based on influence in evolutionary vaccination game model by introducing two parameters, memory length and preference degree, and conduct computational simulations on BA scale-free network. The results indicate that the current mechanism significantly and effectively enhances vaccination campaign. Specifically, when the vaccination cost is small, the introduction of long-term memory can boost vaccination by diminishing the advantage of free-riders, irrespective of the preference degree. Conversely, when the vaccination cost is large, long-term memory makes vaccination difficult to prevail, and only by the consideration of one-step memory, vaccination strategy can be promoted, particularly with the negative preference for influence.