Experiments on partnership and decision making in a disaster environment

The time of entry and the desired activity into a disaster area play an important role in leading to the optimal mix of partners for an agency operating in a disaster scenario. In this paper, based on current literature and interviews in disaster environments by the authors, we designed and executed six experiments. Each experiment is designed to measure a particular component of how agencies make partnership decisions in a disaster environment, with the goal of developing a model of how such decisions would affect operational efficacy. In each experiment, players made partnership and resource allocation decisions in a simulated disaster environment. A wide range of experimental data were gathered to understand how different information influenced decision-making. Each trial of the six experiments had random parameter values, and a logic component for how other agencies in the disaster environment acted with stochastic perturbation. Based on the results of each experiment, we developed a simple model that used the most significant drivers of participant performance. The significant factors in decision making during simulated disaster operations included: agency efficiency, past project investment, partner size, significance of impact on the population, and the amount of remaining need. The impact of this work is two-fold: 1) Identifying some of the underlying biases in human decision making when engaging in cooperative competition, or “coopetition,” and 2) Providing simple decision-making models for understanding, simulating, and predicting agency behavior as part of a disaster response operation.