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Choosing what to protect.

Vicki M Bier1

  • 1Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA. bier@engr.wisc.edu

Risk Analysis : an Official Publication of the Society for Risk Analysis
|July 21, 2007
PubMed
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Defenders strategically allocate resources against unknown attackers by exploiting negative externalities. Optimal defense involves centralized, public resource allocation, even leaving some locations undefended.

Area of Science:

  • Game Theory
  • Operations Research
  • Security Studies

Background:

  • Resource allocation under uncertainty is critical for security.
  • Defender's dilemma: balancing protection across multiple locations against an informed attacker.
  • Negative externalities arise as defending one location can increase risk at others.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To model and analyze strategic resource allocation for a defender facing an adaptive attacker.
  • To understand the defender's optimal strategy considering externalities and attacker's observation.
  • To identify key factors influencing the defender's allocation decisions.

Main Methods:

  • Development of a strategic game-theoretic model.
  • Analysis of equilibrium strategies for defender and attacker.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Exploration of defender's preferences for centralized vs. decentralized and public vs. secret allocations.

    • Main Results:

    • Defender optimally exploits negative externalities, sometimes leaving locations undefended or accepting higher vulnerability.
    • Centralized resource allocation is preferred over decentralized.
    • Effective risk reduction is limited by the number of valuable targets.
    • Optimal allocation is non-monotonic with attacker's outside option value.
    • Public defensive allocations are preferred over secret ones.

    Conclusions:

    • Defender's strategic manipulation of externalities is key to optimal defense.
    • Centralized and public resource allocation strategies enhance defender's effectiveness.
    • The complexity of defense scales with the number of valuable targets and attacker's options.