The optimal time to evacuate: A behavioral dynamic model on Louisiana resident data

Abstract

Understanding what affects the decision process leading to evacuation of a population at risk from the threat of a disaster is of upmost importance to successfully implement emergency planning policies. Literature on this is broad; however, the vast majority of behavioral models is limited to conventional structures, such as aggregate participation rate models or disaggregate multinomial logit models. This research introduces a dynamic discrete choice model that takes into account the threat's characteristics and the population's expectation of them. The proposed framework is estimated using Stated Preference (SP) evacuation data collected from Louisiana residents. The results indicate that the proposed dynamic discrete choice model outperforms sequential logit, excels in incorporating demographic information of respondents, a key input in policy evaluation, and yields significantly more accurate predictions of the decision and timing to evacuate.