In the past, few sports mega-events, such as the Munich Olympics and the Boston Marathon, were targets of terror organizations due to their global importance and the high status of the event and people involved.
In a study published in Risk Analysis in July, Marcelo Zawadzki and Gilberto Montibeller examined the risk of terror attacks with the goal of suggesting an effective method to prevent them in the future.
According to the study, there are two reasons why sports mega-events are distinctive from other targets of terror attacks: the first is that the security practices at these events are easily accessible by the public, and the second is the finite nature of the events, in which they have a set time span.
The study by Zawadzki and Montibeller study examines the methods through which the planners for these events decide how their event is going to look, taking into consideration all of their available resources together with their need to discourage terror attacks. It does so by analyzing the decision problems that defense organizers of sports mega-events face, which include limited resources, and also by examining the cases in which terrorist organizations have the choice between multiple targets, or not to attack at all.
The study concludes that the best method is to approach the defense strategy as if it is a Stackelberg game.
The Stackelberg game is a theory in which two parties compete over a certain quantity, which in the case of terror deterrence would be success in either defense or attack. One of the parties is the leader and and they "play" a move, and the other party is the follower and moves sequentially.
Zawadzki and Montibeller suggest this method because the defense plans are public knowledge, thus allowing for the terrorist organization to react accordingly. The defense can then create multiple plans on their analysis of how they think the attack would react.
This method contributes to previous works in the topic of terror deterrence in three ways.
Where past studies have presented the attack's choices as binary (attack or do not attack), this method considers the fact that the terrorist organization has multiple choices.
Furthermore, this method allows for the defense to adopt various methods for deterrence and be more efficient.
Lastly, the algorithms that are built from this method can handle a range of scenarios, making them more thorough.
The objective of using this Stackelberg Game method is to build portfolio of defensive measures that will discourage terrorist organizations from attacking by raising the cost of the attack and lowering the expected pay-off, and thus win the game.