Individual versus overarching protection and attack of assets

Kjell Hausken

Central European Journal of Operations Research, 2014, vol. 22, issue 1, 89-112

Abstract: Two agents protect and attack a collection of assets overarchingly versus individually. Examples of overarching protection are border security, counter intelligence, and public health measures. Both layers of protection have to be breached for an attack to be successful. We consider a simultaneous game, and a two period game with overarching contest in period 1 and individual contests in period 2 if the attacker wins period 1. With reasonable assumptions, such as contest intensities not exceeding one, the defender prefers two protection layers, while the attacker prefers one protection layer. When the unit effort costs of overarching protection and attack are equal, and the agents’ valuations for each asset are equal, in the simultaneous game defender and attacker efforts are equal in the overarching contest. In contrast, for the two period game, the defender invests more than the attacker in the overarching contest to prevent the occurrence of period 2. If the attacker nevertheless wins period 1, both agents exert larger efforts in period 2 compared with the individual contests in the simultaneous game. Framed within the Colonel Blotto literature, the attacker must win the first battlefield (overarching contest) in order to engage in the contests over the n other battlefields (individual contests). Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Keywords: Individual protection; Overarching protection; Colonel Blotto games; Defense; Attack; Game theory; Reliability theory; OR in military; Utility theory; Contest success function; Terrorism; Conflict (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10100-012-0271-6 (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:spr:cejnor:v:22:y:2014:i:1:p:89-112

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... search/journal/10100

DOI: 10.1007/s10100-012-0271-6

Access Statistics for this article

Central European Journal of Operations Research is currently edited by Ulrike Leopold-Wildburger

More articles in Central European Journal of Operations Research from Springer, Slovak Society for Operations Research, Hungarian Operational Research Society, Czech Society for Operations Research, Österr. Gesellschaft für Operations Research (ÖGOR), Slovenian Society Informatika - Section for Operational Research, Croatian Operational Research Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().