Topic: Strategic Vaccination

Lecturer: Assistant Professor, Wanyi Chen, The Wang Yanan Institute for Studies in Economics, Xiamen University

Time: 14:30-16:00 p.m. October 19th, 2023

Venue: B321 Zhixin Building, Central Campus

Abstract: We study mass vaccination as a social learning problem featuring payoff externalities. Vaccines protect the vaccinated from infection, and the unvaccinated indirectly via herd -immunity. However, unsafe vaccines may cause adverse side effects which overweight the protection benefits. A Poisson signal reveals the vaccine to be unsafe and further vaccine recall. We characterize the optimal dynamic vaccination intensity, which may be more or less aggressive than the myopic optimum depending on the signal arrival rate. The equilibrium vaccination is inefficient at each point in time and, due to payoff externalities, possibly in the limit. We provide policies compensating for externalities.