Competition or cooperation? Multiple information diffusion against epidemic spreading in a multiplex network

During an epidemic outbreak, the coexistence and co-spread of different health information are widely observed in social networks. Especially, the relationships between different information are diverse: such as independence, competition, cooperation, etc. This largely affects people’s behavioral responses against the epidemic. However, existing studies on information-epidemic dynamics mainly focus on a single-type of information relationship in affecting epidemic spreading, lacking an overall consideration of different information correlations within a comprehensive model. We therefore develop a novel model to explore the different types of interactions among multiple information and their effects on the dynamics of epidemic spreading. The model considers the potential overlap of different protective behaviors, and the degree of overlap changes accordingly with the information correlation. We find that all types of information correlation helps to restrain the epidemic spreading. Compared with other types of information, cooperation diffusion is more effective at epidemic control. However, we observe a peak controlling effect at medium level of information cooperation, which enables a balance between information diffusion and behavioral effectiveness. When the penetration intensity exceeds the value corresponding to that peak, information cooperation instead tends to slightly decrease the epidemic threshold. This indicates that excessive information cooperation may not always be helpful. Because too much cooperation often brings similar or overlapping protective measures, causing redundant behaviors. Our study emphasizes the importance of information correlations and behavioral overlap in controlling infections, extending research direction on information-epidemic coupled dynamics.