Effects of Property Recovery Incentives and Social Interaction on Self-Evacuation Decisions in Natural Disasters: An Agent-Based Modelling Approach

Abstract

Understanding evacuation decision-making behaviour is one of the key components for designing disaster mitigation policies. This study investigates how communications between household agents in a community influence self-evacuation decisions. We develop an agent-based model that simulates household agents' decisions to evacuate or stay. These agents interact within the framework of evolutionary game theory, effectively competing for limited shared resources, which include property recovery funds and coordination services. We explore four scenarios that model different prioritisations of access to government-provided incentives. We discover that the impact of the incentive diminishes both with increasing funding value and the household agent prioritisation, indicating that there is an optimal level of government support beyond which further increases become impractical. Furthermore, the overall evacuation rate depends on the structure of the underlying social network, showing discontinuous jumps when the prioritisation moves across the node degree. We identify the so-called "community influencers", prioritisation of whom significantly increases the overall evacuation rate. In contrast, prioritising household agents with low connectivity may actually impede collective evacuation. These findings demonstrate the importance of social connectivity between household agents. The results of this study are useful for designing optimal government policies to incentivise and prioritise community evacuation under limited resources.