Is subsidizing vaccination with hub agent priority policy really meaningful to suppress disease spreading?

A Multi Agent Simulation (MAS) model that joins evolutionary game theory with epidemiological dynamics is established. Various subsidy policies that encourage vaccination are evaluated quantitatively with the model. The underlying social network topology is based on a scale-free network. Individual subsidies for vaccinations can be directed to hub agents with priority, to efficiently suppress the overall social cost of a vaccination program. These hub agents are more likely to spread both knowledge about vaccination and the disease in question. Our comprehensive simulations showed that this intuitively appealing strategy cannot be effective if the vaccination cost is low and the vaccination budget is small. Thus, we find that the hub agent priority strategy is not always effective.