Technology adoption for airport security: Modeling public disclosure and secrecy in an attacker-defender game

Abstract Airport security agencies throughout the world play a vital role in safeguarding the aviation industry against terrorist attacks. As a result of the evolving and adaptive behaviors of terrorists, it is critical that security agencies continue to adopt new airport screening technologies in order to expose and deter threats. To this end, the question arises as to whether or not to publicly disclose new screening technology adoption. Although there is literature on strategic information disclosure in defensive resource allocation, to the best of our knowledge, no previous literature has focused on modeling disclosure and secrecy for defensive technology adoption. To address this gap, we develop an attacker-defender game model where the defender is considering adopting a new screening technology, and an adversary is considering attacking an aviation target. Our model addresses two distinct information disclosure strategies on behalf of the defender: (i) public disclosure, which is modeled in a sequential subgame, and (ii) secrecy, which is modeled in a simultaneous subgame. We find that in the proposed complete information game, disclosure of the defender’s technology adoption strategy is either preferred to, or equivalent to, maintaining secrecy. That is to say that the defender never prefers secrecy over disclosure. Overall, this paper helps to fill a significant gap in the literature concerning technology adoption and information disclosure strategies for airport security screening, and also has implications that can inform decision makers in the broader homeland security domain. Historical data is used to drive numerical sensitivity analyses of the equilibrium strategies.