Research for efficiently planning and responding to natural disasters is of vital interest due to the devastating effects and losses caused by their occurrence, including economic deficiency, casualties, and infrastructure damage. Following the large breadth of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, we observe a growing use of game theoretic models in the research concerning natural disaster management. In these models, government agencies and private companies interact as players in a disaster relief game. Notable research in these areas has studied multi-player games and multi-agency collaboration, among others, to provide insights into optimal decisions concerning defensive investment and private-public partnerships in the face of disaster occurrence. This paper aims to increase the comprehension of game theory-based research in disaster management and to provide directions for future research. We analyze and integrate 57 recent papers (2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016) to summarize game theory-based research in natural disaster and emergency management. We find that the response phase of disaster relief has been researched most extensively, and future research could be directed toward the other phases of disaster management such as mitigation, preparedness, and recovery. Attacker-defender games to be utilized relatively frequently to model both mitigation and response for a disaster. Defensive resource allocation and sequential/simultaneous games to model the interaction between agencies/individuals in light of a disaster are two other common ways to model disaster management. In addition to academia, the targeted audience of this research includes governments, private sectors, private citizens, and others who are concerned with or involved in disaster management.

From 1982 to 2017, 539 unique awards studying extreme events and natural disasters have been funded by the Infrastructure Management and Extreme Events (IMEE), Decision, Risk and Management Science (DRMS), Humans, Disasters, and the Built Environment (HDBE), and Hazard Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (Hazard SEES) programs under the National Science Foundation, totaling approximately $450 million. The relationships between discipline, topic, and funding are explored through review of the data on each award's active dates, amount of funding received, specific hazards and disasters studied, and principal investigator (PI) and co-PI affiliations. A positive correlation between award funding and increasingly larger multidisciplinary teams of PIs on projects is observed. However, these teams of four or more PIs only account for about 18% of the total number of awards. In terms of topic, projects applicable to general hazard/disaster research encompass the largest portion of awards, but not the greatest funding per award on average. Additionally, both the number of awards per year and the total funds allotted per year show an increasing trend. Finally, some of the trends in project team discipline with relation to hazards show a shift to equal numbers of engineers and social scientists on multidisciplinary teams while others remain fairly homogeneous in their team dynamics. This article provides unique perspectives on how to better allocate funds through extensive topic and funding analysis. This work is a brief analysis of trends in the hazard and disaster research community, focusing on multidisciplinary project teams and their correlation to funding amounts and research areas.