Decentralised Defence of a (Directed) Network Structure

Marco Pelliccia

No 1506, Birkbeck Working Papers in Economics and Finance from Birkbeck, Department of Economics, Mathematics & Statistics

Abstract: We model the decentralised defence choice of agents connected in a directed graph and exposed to an external threat. The network allows the players to receive goods from one or more producers through directed paths. Each agent is endowed with a finite and divisible defence resource that can be allocated to their own security or to that of their peers. The external threat is represented by an intelligent attacker who aims to maximise the flow-disruption by seeking to destroy one node. The set of the attackerÂ’s potential targets is a subset of the set of middleman nodes and producers. These are the critical nodes with highest brokerage power in a directed network and therefore crucial to the system-flow. We show that a decentralised defence allocation is efficient when we assume perfect information: a centralised allocation of defence resources which minimises the flow-disruption coincides with a decentralised allocation. On the other hand, when we assume imperfect information, the decentralised allocation is inefficient and involves no reallocation of defence resources between the nodes. Finally, for a given connected graph, by increasing the link-density we can reduce the set of middleman nodes and thus the number of the potential targets. This also decreases the probability of a successful attack.

Keywords: Networks; Network defence, Security. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C69 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth and nep-net
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/15273 First version, 2015 (application/pdf)

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Journal Article: Decentralized Defence of a (Directed) Network Structure (2020)
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