Publications

Journal Article

Evaluating and quantifying human suffering in humanitarian operations offers an innovative and potentially powerful way to assess the performance of humanitarian logistics and help build optimization models. Previous studies have suggested deprivation cost as a metric and have estimated deprivation cost functions for water using willingness-to-pay.

This study proposes deprivation levels, defined as the degree of human suffering caused by lack of access to a good or service, and estimates deprivation level functions using a numerical rating scale. Analyzing data collected from respondents with and without disaster experience, the authors find that individuals in the latter category estimate deprivation differently from the beneficiaries of disaster relief.

The study demonstrates that deprivation levels can be expressed as logistic growth functions with a typical S-shape, and that these can be integrated into humanitarian logistics optimization models to better account for human suffering.