A Review of Game Theory Application Research in Safety Management

Abstract

There are many heterogeneous roles involved in safety management. The behaviour interaction and strategic interactions among them will have an important impact on safety processes in the execution phase. Game theory is a powerful method for clarifying the influence mechanism and is currently experiencing rapid growth in operations, planning and management, as well as in safety management. To comprehensively sort out the current situation of game theory in safety management and finally find out the development trend of applying game theory in safety management. This paper reviews 57 related articles (2010-2019) surrounding game theory and safety management. The main results show that the applications of game theory in the research of safety management is helpful to find out the cause and motive force of unsafe behaviours. We find that currently, most researches are mainly in traffic safety, and researchers may point to food safety, construction safety, coal mine safety, electrical safety and other fields in the future. In addition, game theory plays a very important role in guiding the decision-making of stakeholders in the process of safety management.

Influencing Factors, Formation Mechanism, and Pre-control Methods of Coal Miners′ Unsafe Behavior: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Game theory is a research method that uses mathematical models to describe the strategic interaction between independent players. It provides optimal decision-making strategies for game players by simulating the situation in the model and has been applied in studying the formation mechanism of coal mine workers' unsafe behaviors ( 75 ). Yu et al ( 76 ) studied the symmetry of behavioral benefits of coal miners by using game theory and reported that the stability of safety behavior can be improved by adjusting the symmetry of income between managers and workers through dynamic incentives.…”

“…Yang et al ( 37 ) established a signal transmission game between miners and managers based on the game theory model to test the influence of managers' emotions on miners' behaviors. Meng et al ( 75 ) reviewed relevant articles on game theory and safety management during 2010–2019 and affirmed that the application of game theory in safety management research is conducive to determine the causes and motivations of unsafe behaviors. Li et al ( 79 ) also discussed the use of evolutionary game theory to describe the interaction between stakeholders in China's coal mine safety production system, including organizations, front-line miners, and front-line managers.…”

The Decision-Making Process of People With Disabilities Employment in the Context of Occupational Safety and Sustainable Development

“…Models based on game theory may have some diagnostic uncertainty due to the difficulty of modeling individual variables on the other party's intentions to comply with occupational safety requirements, but this interaction can be modeled by games with incomplete information [12,14].…”

Using evolutionary game theory to study construction safety supervisory mechanism in China

“…Some studies indicated that rentseeking behavior led to great fluctuations in productivity in Chinese coal mine safety Construction safety supervisory mechanism supervision (Chen et al, 2016). In a similar vein, the collusion between the GC and the SE wildly exists in construction safety supervision (Meng et al, 2020). The existence of rentseeking renders safety supervision, a mere formality because SE may conceal potential safety hazards or ignore faults in projects, which increases the likelihood of accidents.…”