Counterterrorism resource allocation during a pandemic: The effects of dynamic target valuations when facing a strategic terrorist

Abstract

The outbreak of pandemics such as COVID‐19 can result in cascading effects for global systemic risk. To combat an ongoing pandemic, governmental resources are largely allocated toward supporting the health of the public and economy. This shift in attention can lead to security vulnerabilities which are exploited by terrorists. In view of this, counterterrorism during a pandemic is of critical interest to the safety and well‐being of the global society. Most notably, the population flows among potential targets are likely to change in conjunction with the trend of the health crisis, which leads to fluctuations in target valuations. In this situation, a new challenge for the defender is to optimally allocate his/her resources among targets that have changing valuations, where his/her intention is to minimize the expected losses from potential terrorist attacks. In order to deal with this challenge, in this paper, we first develop a defender–attacker game in sequential form, where the target valuations can change as a result of the pandemic. Then we analyze the effects of a pandemic on counterterrorism resource allocation from the perspective of dynamic target valuations. Finally, we provide some examples to display the theoretical results, and present a case study to illustrate the usability of our proposed model during a pandemic.

On the adoption of nonpharmaceutical interventions during the pandemic: An evolutionary game model

“…Of more interest is when the game is involved, where individual payoff depends on the actions of others. Game‐theoretic model is applied to study strategic interactions among multiple players, and encompasses a wide range of applications such as economics (Rabin, 1993; Samuelson, 2016), homeland security (Golalikhani & Zhuang, 2011; Zhang et al., 2021; Zhuang & Bier, 2007), risk analysis (Chen et al., 2022; Cox, 2009; Hausken, 2002), pricing decisions (Wang et al., 2022), parking management (Guo et al., 2013), crowd funding (Mahbub et al., 2022), rumor management (Agarwal et al., 2022; Li et al., 2021), fire code inspection (Agarwal et al., 2020), and disaster management (Seaberg et al., 2017). Some research focuses on studying strategic behaviors of people in the epidemic/pandemic context using the classic game theory framework, where each player selects a strategy that is the best response to the strategy chosen by the other (Chang et al., 2020; Huang & Zhu, 2022).…”

Global analysis of the COVID‐19 policy activity levels and evolution patterns: A cross‐sectional study

“…Furthermore, some decision problems under government COVID-19 policies, such as medical capacity investment, counterterrorism resource allocation, and psychological health impacts, have been studied. [8][9][10] One of the most important factors determining the development of the pandemic is the proactivity of the government response to the pandemic, which is called the activity level of the government COVID-19 policies in this paper. A high policy activity level can be interpreted as policy responses that are faster than the level of pandemic development, while on the contrary, it is a low policy activity level.…”

“…Robinson et al 7 analyzed the trade‐off between the benefits and costs of government COVID‐19 policies. Furthermore, some decision problems under government COVID‐19 policies, such as medical capacity investment, counterterrorism resource allocation, and psychological health impacts, have been studied 8–10 …”

“…Furthermore, some decision problems under government COVID‐19 policies, such as medical capacity investment, counterterrorism resource allocation, and psychological health impacts, have been studied. 8 , 9 , 10 …”