Attacker Deterrence and Perceived Risk in a Stackelberg Security Game

Garret Ridinger; Richard S John; Michael McBride; Nicholas Scurich

doi:10.1111/risa.12547

Attacker Deterrence and Perceived Risk in a Stackelberg Security Game

Risk Anal. 2016 Aug;36(8):1666-81. doi: 10.1111/risa.12547. Epub 2016 Feb 17.

Authors

Garret Ridinger^{1

2}, Richard S John³, Michael McBride^{1

2}, Nicholas Scurich^{4

5

6}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Economics, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
² Experimental Social Science Laboratory, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
³ Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
⁴ Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
⁵ Department of Criminology, Law, and Society, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
⁶ School of Law, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.

PMID: 26889768
DOI: 10.1111/risa.12547

Abstract

In Stackelberg security games, a defender must allocate scarce resources to defend against a potential attacker. The optimal defense involves the randomization of scarce security resources, yet how attackers perceive the risk given randomized defense is not well understood. We conducted an experiment where attackers chose whether to attack or not attack targets protected by randomized defense schemes, the key treatment variable being whether the defender picks one target at random to guard or imperfectly guards all targets. The two schemes are expected-payoff equivalent, and when provided separately we found no effect of having one scheme or the other. Yet, when both are present, we found that subjects had a preference for the fixed scheme, a preference that cannot be reduced to differences in beliefs. Overall, our results suggest that understanding how individuals perceive risk is vital to understand the behavior of attackers.

Keywords: Attack; perception; security.

Publication types

Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.