Title: You Can Only Die Once: Interdependent Security in an Uncertain World
Abstract: This chapter describes how there are certain bad events that can only occur once. Death is the obvious example: an individual’s death is irreversible and unrepeatable. More mundane examples are bankruptcy, being struck off a professional register, and other discrete events. In addition there are other events that can in principle occur twice but that are so unlikely and/or so dreadful that one occurrence is all that can reasonably be considered. The events of September 11, 2001 are perhaps of this type. A nuclear meltdown in a highly populated region is another. The fact that such events are typically probabilistic, taken together with the fact that the risk that one agent faces is often determined in part by the behavior of others, fives a unique and hitherto unnoticed structure to the incentives that agents face in order to reduce exposures to these risks. The key point is that the incentive that any agent has to invest in risk-reduction measures depends on how they expect the others to behave. The fundamental question this chapter addresses is: “Do organizations, such as airline companies and computer network managers, invest in security to a degree that is adequate from either a private or social perspective?
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-12-20
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 12
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