Nature plays with dice - terrorists do not: Allocating resources to counter strategic versus probabilistic risks

Boaz Golany, Edward H. Kaplan, Abraham Marmur and Uriel G. Rothblum

European Journal of Operational Research, 2009, vol. 192, issue 1, 198-208

Abstract: Probabilistic uncertainty is caused by "chance", whereas strategic uncertainty is caused by an adverse interested party. Using linear impact functions, the problems of allocating a limited resource to defend sites that face either probabilistic risk or strategic risk are formulated as optimization problems that are solved explicitly. The resulting optimal policies differ - under probabilistic risk, the optimal policy is to focus the investment of resources on priority sites where they yield the highest impact, while under strategic risk, the best policy is to spread the resources so as to decrease the potential damage level of the most vulnerable site(s). Neither solution coincides with the commonly practiced proportionality allocation scheme.

Keywords: Risk; analysis; Game; theory; Resource; allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (54)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377-2217(07)00914-9
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:192:y:2009:i:1:p:198-208

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().