High-performance inter-organizational interaction for disaster response: An evolutionary game

Disaster response requires cooperation among many aid agencies, some of which may never have worked together in the past. What enables such agencies to rapidly establish the trust and cooperative behavior necessary for effectively aiding victims of a disaster? Literature presents two main candidates for the enabling mechanism: Probability assessment, and indirect reciprocity. This paper describes a spreadsheet-based game that may be used to determine which of these is the dominant mechanism. The game also tests whether an agency´s response strategy is evolutionary, i.e., whether the agency finds it best to shift resources between technical training (e.g., firefighting) and training in inter-agency coordination.