Influence of committed volunteers on helping behavior in emergency evacuations

TL;DR

This paper investigates how committed volunteers influence helping behavior during emergency evacuations using an evolutionary game model coupled with pedestrian dynamics, revealing that a minimum number of volunteers promotes cooperation.

Contribution

It introduces a coupled game-theoretic and pedestrian movement model to analyze the impact of committed volunteers on collective helping behavior in evacuations.

Findings

Committed volunteers promote cooperation in evacuations.

A minimum number of volunteers is needed to effectively enhance helping behavior.

Evacuation dynamics significantly influence collective helping evolution.

Abstract

We study how the presence of committed volunteers influences the collective helping behavior in emergency evacuation scenarios. In this study, committed volunteers do not change their decision to help injured persons, implying that other evacuees may adapt their helping behavior through strategic interactions. An evolutionary game theoretic model is developed which is then coupled to a pedestrian movement model to examine the collective helping behavior in evacuations. By systematically controlling the number of committed volunteers and payoff parameters, we have characterized and summarized various collective helping behaviors in phase diagrams. From our numerical simulations, we observe that the existence of committed volunteers can promote cooperation but adding additional committed volunteers is effective only above a minimum number of committed volunteers. This study also highlights that the evolution of collective helping behavior is strongly affected by the evacuation process.