Self-enforcing regional vaccination agreements.

ABSTRACT: In a highly interconnected world, immunizing infections are a transboundary problem, and their control and elimination require international cooperation and coordination. In the absence of a global or regional body that can impose a universal vaccination strategy, each individual country sets its own strategy. Mobility of populations across borders can promote free-riding, because a country can benefit from the vaccination efforts of its neighbours, which can result in vaccination coverage lower than the global optimum. Here we explore whether voluntary coalitions that reward countries that join by cooperatively increasing vaccination coverage can solve this problem. We use dynamic epidemiological models embedded in a game-theoretic framework in order to identify conditions in which coalit

SUBMITTER: Klepac P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4759795 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature