Suppressing Epidemic Spreading by Imitating Hub Nodes' Strategy

In this brief, we incorporate the impact of preferential imitation rule into a vaccination game based epidemic spreading model on social networks, where each individual chooses one of its neighbors as an imitation reference with a probability proportional to the neighbor's degree. Our results indicate that the vaccination coverage can be remarkably increased if hub nodes are preferentially imitated, leading to the dramatic reduction of the epidemic size. We explain this by suggesting that the vaccination willingness of hub nodes is very high when voluntary vaccination mechanism is assumed, who can attract more individuals to take vaccination if they are preferentially imitated. Moreover, a mean-field theoretical approach is developed to further verify our findings. This brief suggests that the human behavioral response is an important factor for spreading dynamics.