Hiding in plain sight – using signals to detect terrorists

Atin Basuchoudhary and Laura Razzolini ()

Public Choice, 2006, vol. 128, issue 1, 245-255

Abstract: This paper studies the interaction between a governmental security agency, as the Transportation Security Agency, or the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and a terrorist organization, like Al Qaeda. The governmental agency wants to stop the terrorists, but first must infer whether a visa applicant or an airline passenger is a terrorist on the basis of some observable signal. The terrorist organization's objective is to get past security to commit murder and mayhem. We derive the equilibrium strategy for this signaling model, and evaluate specific anti-terrorist policies, as the creation of the new Homeland Security Agency and increased airport security screening. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006

Keywords: Terrorism; Deterrence; Signaling game; Non cooperative game; Nash equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11127-006-9052-x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:pubcho:v:128:y:2006:i:1:p:245-255

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11127-006-9052-x

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().