Mechanism design for defense coordination in security games

Jiarui Gan, Edith Elkind, Sarit Kraus, Michael Wooldridge

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

Recent work studied Stackelberg security games with multiple defenders, in which heterogeneous defenders allocate security resources to protect a set of targets against a strategic attacker. Equilibrium analysis was conducted to characterize outcomes of these games when defenders act independently. Our starting point is the observation that the use of resources in equilibria may be inefficient due to lack of coordination. We explore the possibility of reducing this inefficiency by coordinating the defenders-specifically, by pooling the defenders' resources and allocating them jointly. The defenders' heterogeneous preferences then give rise to a collective decision-making problem, which calls for a mechanism to generate joint allocation strategies. We seek a mechanism that encourages coordination, produces efficiency gains, and incentivizes the defenders to report their true preferences and to execute the recommended strategies. Our results show that, unfortunately, even these basic properties clash with each other and no mechanism can achieve them simultaneously, which reveals the intrinsic difficulty of achieving meaningful defense coordination in security games. On the positive side, we put forward mechanisms that fulfill some of these properties and we identify special cases of our setting where more of these properties are compatible.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2020
EditorsBo An, Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, Gita Sukthankar
PublisherInternational Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS)
Pages402-410
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781450375184
StatePublished - 2020
Event19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2020 - Virtual, Auckland, New Zealand
Duration: 19 May 2020 → …

Publication series

NameProceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS
Volume2020-May
ISSN (Print)1548-8403
ISSN (Electronic)1558-2914

Conference

Conference19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2020
Country/TerritoryNew Zealand
CityVirtual, Auckland
Period19/05/20 → …

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 International Foundation for Autonomous.

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under grant number 639945 (ACCORD). Jiarui Gan was supported by the EPSRC International Doctoral Scholars Grant EP/N509711/1. Sarit Kraus was partially supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Israel and the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), Japan.

FundersFunder number
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research CouncilEP/N509711/1
European Commission639945
Japan Science and Technology Agency
Ministry of science and technology, Israel

    Keywords

    • Coordination
    • Mechanism design
    • Stackelberg Security games

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