Natural disaster evacuation modeling: the dichotomy of fear of crime and social influence

Neighborhood effects have an important role in evacuation decision-making by a family. Owing to peer influence, neighbors evacuating can motivate a family to evacuate. Paradoxically, if a lot of neighbors evacuate, then the likelihood of an individual or family deciding to evacuate decreases, for fear of crime and looting. Such behavior cannot be captured using standard models of contagion spread on networks, e.g., threshold, independent cascade, and linear threshold models. Here, we propose a new threshold-based graph dynamical system model, 2mode-threshold, which captures this dichotomy. We study theoretically the dynamical properties of 2mode-threshold in different networks, and find significant differences from a standard threshold model. We build and characterize small world networks of Virginia Beach, VA, where nodes are geolocated families (households) in the city and edges are interactions between pairs of families. We demonstrate the utility of our behavioral model through agent-based simulations on these small world networks. We use it to understand evacuation rates in this region, and to evaluate the effects of modeling parameters on evacuation decision dynamics. Specifically, we quantify the effects of (1) network generation parameters, (2) stochasticity in the social network generation process, (3) model types (2mode-threshold vs. standard threshold models), (4) 2mode-threshold model parameters, (5) and initial conditions, on computed evacuation rates and their variability. An illustrative example result shows that the absence of looting effect can overpredict evacuation rates by as much as 50%.