Build a Game-Theoretic Framework for Community’s Role in Counter-Terrorism

Terrorism poses a major challenge to the government whenever it surfaces in any nation. It degrades the economic, infrastructural and trading systems. Furthermore, it reduces international revenues from tourism and foreign investments. Most importantly, it causes socio-ethnic tension and safety concerns to the nationals. Game-theoretic models have been widely applied to study the strategic interactions between the defender and attacker. In this thesis, we build three two-player subgames, and a three-player game-theoretic model, where the government, community and terrorist are involved. The community could support either the government or the terrorists. Both sequential and simultaneous games are studied with different orders of moves. We identify conditions where the community equilibrium strategy is to support the government. This paper finds first-mover advantage confirming previous research, identifies conditions where the community would support the government at equilibrium, and studies how robust their optimal behavior is to various external and internal factors.