The paper argues that welfare economic principles must be incorporated in post‐disaster humanitarian logistic models to ensure delivery strategies that lead to the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The paper's analyses suggest the use of social costs—the summation of logistic and deprivation costs—as the preferred objective function for post‐disaster humanitarian logistic models. The paper defines deprivation cost as the economic valuation of the human suffering associated with a lack of access to a good or service. The use of deprivation costs is evaluated with a review of the philosophy and the economic literature to identify proper foundations for their estimation; a comparison of different proxy approaches to consider human suffering (e.g., minimization of penalties or weight factors, penalties for late deliveries, equity constraints, unmet demands) and their implications; and an analysis of the impacts of errors in estimation. In its final sections, the paper conducts numerical experiments to illustrate the comparative impacts of using the proxy approaches suggested in the literature, and concludes with a discussion of key findings.

This paper describes the findings of the research conducted by the authors on the humanitarian logistic efforts after the cascading disasters that impacted the Tohoku region after the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11 th , 2011. Using a combination of in depth interviews with participants in the relief efforts and meta analyses of news accounts, the authors identified lessons learned by the participants, and the corresponding policy implications and suggestions for improvement of future response efforts.

No abstract

This paper details research to design an estimation process for Deprivation Cost Functions (DCF) using Contingent Valuation, and to apply it econometrically to obtain a DCF for drinkable water. The paper describes both the process and results obtained. The results indicate that deprivation costs for drinkable water have a non-linear relation with deprivation times. The estimated DCFs provide a consistent metric that could be incorporated into humanitarian logistic mathematical models, eliminating the need to use proxy metrics, and providing a better way to assess the impacts of delivery options and actions. The research reported in this paper is the first attempt in the literature to produce estimates of the economic value of human suffering created by the deprivation of a critical supply or service.

No abstract