Efficient emergency collaboration is essential in modern complex disaster response scenarios. Understanding the key factors that influence the formation and evolution of collaboration relationships is fundamental for establishing effective emergency collaboration networks. Therefore, this study focuses on investigating these factors using Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGM), within the context of extreme weather disasters. The potential influencing factors are summarized as four categories: nature of the organizations, similarity among the response organizations, pre-disaster collaborative experiences, and self-organizing during emergency response. A two-stage Zhengzhou heavy rainstorm disaster (“July” and “August”) was selected as a case study to examine the hypothesis. Firstly, two emergency collaboration networks were constructed based on the same rules with special news reports and related official data. Then, the examinations were conducted respectively based on ERGM to explore the explanatory power of those factors in the formation and evolution of emergency collaboration networks. Further, through a comparative verification analysis, the factors to be examined are divided into three groups according to their performance at different phases. The findings indicate that: (1) Internal and external factors jointly contribute to the formation of emergency collaboration networks, but the endogenous structures can offset some organizational attribute preferences and homogeneity factors. (2) Among the endogenous structural factors, the transitivity effect significantly promotes the formation and expansion of the network, rather than the expansion effect and bridging effect. (3)Collaborating with public sectors, organizations with command and coordination responsibilities, and those possessing information resource endowments can contribute to the improvement of the emergency collaboration efficiency. (4) Pre-disaster collaborative experiences, such as emergency drills and previous crisis experiences, facilitate the evolution and optimization of emergency collaboration networks. The research findings aim to support local governments in establishing a more comprehensive collaboration mechanism for responding to complex disasters.
Qie et al. (Tue,) studied this question.