The Relationship Between Individual Willingness to Collaborate and the Performance of Collaborative Public Crisis Governance: An Agent-Based Model

Purpose—Through the study, we discovered the key factors for decision makers involved in public crisis governance with respect to deciding whether to cooperate or not, and to understanding how they relate to governance performance. Methodology—This study extends the classic NK model, constructs an agent-based model to simulate the decision-making process of collaborative public crisis governance, and analyzes the effects of individual trust level, the level of cooperative relationship between individuals, and the standard deviation of the individual trust level on governance performance. Findings—This study found that when the complexity of a public crisis event is high, a high level of trust in the participants and a slightly lower level of inter-individual partnership would be appropriate in order to improve the responsiveness of governance decisions. If a small number of high-quality governance decisions are pursued, and there are high levels of trust and standard deviations of trust levels of the participating governance agents, as well as a strong level of partnership between individuals, it will result in more in-depth, comprehensive and high-quality governance decisions. Value—Although this study has slight shortcomings concerning the homogeneity of the choice of participating governance agents and the sensitivity of the simulation experiment, it has some theoretical contributions regarding decision making for collaborative public crisis governance.