A transaction cost equilibrium analysis on overlap between emergency response task groups

Abstract

Nowadays a growing number of countries’ emergency management mechanisms are based on the network governance mechanism. The task group such as emergency support function (ESF) of the United States is the basic component of emergency response network. How to share function units among task groups is a basic problem of network structure design. This paper proposes a model to decompose transaction cost structure of cooperation between groups and evaluate different choices of sharing units between groups. Through applying this model to the case with only two groups, it shows the equilibrium solution to both sides could be obtained by a bottom-up method.