Modeling Helping Behavior in Emergency Evacuations Using Volunteer's Dilemma Game

TL;DR

This paper models helping behavior during emergency evacuations using a volunteer's dilemma game integrated with social force models, revealing how helping patterns vary with cost parameters through simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel simulation combining game theory and social dynamics to analyze collective helping behavior in evacuations, highlighting the impact of volunteering costs.

Findings

Helping behavior patterns depend on the cost parameter.

Different collective helping patterns are summarized in a phase diagram.

The model links spatial and social dynamics in evacuation scenarios.

Abstract

People often help others who are in trouble, especially in emergency evacuation situations. For instance, during the 2005 London bombings, it was reported that evacuees helped injured persons to escape the place of danger. In terms of game theory, it can be understood that such helping behavior provides a collective good while it is a costly behavior because the volunteers spend extra time to assist the injured persons in case of emergency evacuations. In order to study the collective effects of helping behavior in emergency evacuations, we have performed numerical simulations of helping behavior among evacuees in a room evacuation scenario. Our simulation model is based on the volunteer's dilemma game reflecting volunteering cost. The game theoretic model is coupled with a social force model to understand the relationship between the spatial and social dynamics of evacuation scenarios. By systematically changing the cost parameter of helping behavior, we observed different patterns of collective helping behaviors and these collective patterns are summarized with a phase diagram.