The efficacy of decentralized disaster relief resource allocation within communities: The role of community-based sharing captains

Motivated by numerous observations that neighbors want to help and be helped by each other, this study investigates the feasibility of a decentralized resource allocation strategy where sharing captains distribute disaster relief resources within their community. Here sharing captains are residents themselves who step up during a disaster and take on the role of sharing/distributing resources with/to their neighbors. Using data from two socioeconomically different communities in Seattle, we simulate and compare the efficacy of the proposed decentralized strategy and the status quo fixed-point distribution method that relies on residents to come and get resources on their own. Our findings reveal that the decentralized approach significantly reduces residents’ deprivation costs (a measure on residents’ suffering due to resource shortage) and reaches 100% resource coverage faster than the fixed-point distribution strategy. For both communities, our experiments suggest that an effective range of sharing captains is between 30 and 40. Though the success of the decentralized strategy lies fundamentally on residents’ willingness to share, a satisfactory outcome can be reached even when a substantial share of residents (40%) are unwilling to share with anybody. This is in contrast to only 3% and 7% of the residents in these two communities who are found to be unwilling to share with anybody. Furthermore, sharing captains’ own biases in distributing resources appear to have a marginal effect on the resource allocation outcomes. On selecting sharing captains, a comprehensive strategy considering multiple factors (sharing preferences, number of social ties, and civic engagement) shall be adopted.