Trade-offs in a Tempest: Stakeholder Influence on Hurricane Evacuation Decisions

Stakeholders often control vital resources for decision makers, and this can lead decision makers to take stakeholder opinions into account when making important decisions. This process can be complicated by a number of factors. First, many important decisions involve risk and uncertainty. When the outcome is uncertain, how does a decision maker take the views of stakeholders into account? Second, many decision makers are accountable to multiple different stakeholder groups with different preferences. How do these heterogeneous stakeholder groups affect the process of decision making? More generally, do these stakeholder considerations lead to decisions that are not socially optimal? We explore these and related questions by focusing on a specific type of high stakes decision making in a context featuring significant risk and heterogeneous stakeholders – the decision to evacuate a community during the threat of a hurricane hitting land. While there is research on weather forecasting techniques and individual evacuation behavior, there is no research on the behavior of local officials in making hurricane evacuation decisions. These decisions provide an excellent context for an exploration for the specific processes by which stakeholder considerations may affect the process of decision making. This study offers a simple model of the underlying process behind evacuation decision making. The model focuses on how the evacuation threshold is set based on the anticipated costs of type I versus type II errors. We then use the model – supplemented with rich qualitative and quantitative data – to offer a series of propositions about the conditions under which non-socially optimal evacuation decisions may be made. The paper contributes to the literature on decision making by offering a simple model integrating decision making and stakeholder considerations, and by offering specific and novel propositions about this integration.