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Vaccination is the primary intervention for controlling the
spread of infectious diseases. A certain level of vaccination
rate (referred to as “herd immunity”) is needed for this intervention
to be effective. However, there are concerns that
herd immunity might not be achieved due to an increasing
level of hesitancy and opposition to vaccines. One of the primary
reasons for this is the cost of non-conformance with
one’s peers. We use the framework of network coordination
games to study the persistence of anti-vaccine sentiment in a
population. We extend it to incorporate the opposing forces
of the pressure of conforming to peers, herd-immunity and
vaccination benefits. We study the structure of the equilibria
in such games, and the characteristics of unvaccinated nodes.
We also study Stackelberg strategies to reduce the number of
nodes with anti-vaccine sentiment. Finally, we evaluate our
results on different kinds of real world social networks.
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