  The decision of whether or not to vaccinate is a complex one. It involves the
contribution both to a social good -- herd immunity -- and to one's own well
being. It is informed by social influence, personal experience, education, and
mass media. In our work, we investigate a situation in which individuals make
their choice based on how social neighbourhood responded to previous epidemics.
We do this by proposing a minimalistic model using components from game theory,
network theory and the modelling of epidemic spreading, and opinion dynamics.
Individuals can use the information about the neighbourhood in two ways --
either they follow the majority or the best-performing neighbour. Furthermore,
we let individuals learn which of these two decision-making strategies to
follow from their experience. Our results show that the flexibility of
individuals to chose how to integrate information from the neighbourhood
increases the vaccine uptake and decreases the epidemic severity if the
following conditions are fulfilled. First, the initial fraction of individuals
who imitate the neighbourhood majority should be limited, and second, the
memory of previous outbreaks should be sufficiently long. These results have
implications for the acceptance of novel vaccines and raising awareness about
vaccination, while also pointing to promising future research directions.
