On the adoption of new technology to enhance counterterrorism measures: An attacker–defender game with risk preferences

To address the adaptive and dynamic threats that terrorists bring to our global society, it is imperative that counterterrorism agencies continue to improve their capabilities. To this end, one important challenge that has received scarce attention in the research community is the adoption of new counterterrorism technologies. Given that the adoption of new technology is common in practice (e.g., baggage scanners at airports, UAVs for border surveillance, maritime monitoring systems, port screening systems), it is essential to study the strategic advantages of doing so. To help fill the gap in the literature, in this article, we develop an attacker–defender model in which a defender seeks to adopt new technology, and an adversary seeks to attack a target. We model a discrete choice defender and a continuous choice attacker, where the contest success function is endogenously determined. Aside from proposing a novel game-theoretic model, we also extensively study the risk attitudes of the players. Among other interesting insights, we find that the risk averse defender plays a more cautious game, and when she is very risk averse or very risk seeking, she does not adopt technology. For the adversary, when he is risk seeking he generally devotes more effort to an attack. This paper helps to fill a significant gap in the literature concerning the adoption of new counterterrorism technology when facing a strategic adversary, and the role of the players’ risk preferences in this game environment.