Modeling State-Dependent Priorities of Malicious Agents

Sumitra Sri Bhashyam () and Gilberto Montibeller ()
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Sumitra Sri Bhashyam: Department of Management, London School of Economics and Political Sciences, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom
Gilberto Montibeller: Department of Management, London School of Economics and Political Sciences, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom

Decision Analysis, 2012, vol. 9, issue 2, 172-185

Abstract: With ever-increasing terror threats, governments and security officials would benefit from a better understanding of what motivates terrorists to cause social unrest. A recent research trend is on gaining greater knowledge about the values of malicious agents to help manage the risk of terrorism. As a result, there seems to be the potential to use decision analysis as a means to model what may drive malicious agents to commit harmful actions. So far, research on this topic has assumed static preferences of such agents. In this paper, we present a framework that may be used to infer how terrorists' priorities may change over time and their impact on their choice of a harmful action. We suggest modeling state-dependent priorities of a terrorist group via a multicriteria model that incorporates state-dependent priorities to account for preference change caused by exogenous triggers and representing the environment as a system dynamics model. We describe how terrorists' visceral factors may affect the prioritization of objectives and show how such an analysis may support risk management in this context.

Keywords: terrorism; terrorist threats; multiattribute utility theory; value models; state-dependent priorities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ordeca:v:9:y:2012:i:2:p:172-185

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