A game-theoretic model of international influenza vaccination coordination

摘要

One of the challenges of the vaccination programs is the coordination of incentives of different purchasers of influenza vaccines. These incentives are misaligned because of 1. Interdependent risks due to transnational disease transmission, 2. Economic sensitivities to influenza outbreaks in different countries, and 3. Different decisions made by the governments of those countries. Thus, there is a suboptimal allocation of vaccines for annual influenza, which is relative to the objective of minimizing the global financial burden of influenza. However, initiatives are made to ensure that regions that are the source of infection receive guaranteed vaccine quantities, financial support for cold supply chains, increased supply and provision to developing countries. Using a game-theoretic approach and a simplified epidemic model that accounts for a number of key risks and that is tractable, the research work has tried to construct contractual mechanisms that can increase vaccine supplies for seasonal influenza to developing countries. The key idea is that the source country is subsidized to increase its vaccination effort by other countries that also benefit from that vaccination effort due to interdependent risks of infection transmission. The paper also reports the numerical experiments conducted and the significant benefits of contracts that are derived with the simplified epidemic model. (33 refs.)