On the Provision of Public Goods on Networks: Incentives, Exit Equilibrium, and Applications to Cyber .

Cyber Security;Network Games;Public Goods;Game Theory;Economics;Computer Science;Electrical Engineering;Business and Economics;Engineering;Electrical Engineering: Systems

Naghizadeh Ardabili, ParinazLoeb, Martin P ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Cyber Security;    Network Games;    Public Goods;    Game Theory;    Economics;    Computer Science;    Electrical Engineering;    Business and Economics;    Engineering;    Electrical Engineering: Systems;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/133328/naghizad_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Attempts to improve the state of cyber-security have been on the rise over the past years. The importance of incentivizing better security decisions by users in the current landscape is two-fold: it not only helps users protect themselves against attacks, but also provides positive externalities to others interacting with them, as a protected user is less likely to become compromised and be used to propagate attacks against other entities. Therefore, security can be viewed as a public good. This thesis takes a game-theoretic approach to understanding the theoretical underpinnings of users;; incentives in the provision of public goods, and in particular, cyber-security. We analyze the strategic interactions of users in the provision of security as a non-excludable public good. We propose the notion of exit equilibrium to describe users;; outside options from mechanisms for incentivizing the adoption of better security decisions, and use it to highlight the crucial effect of outside options on the design of incentive mechanisms for improving the state of cyber-security. We further focus on the general problem of public good provision games on networks. We identify necessary and sufficient conditions on the structure of the network for the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium in these games. We show that previous results in the literature can be recovered as special cases of our result. We provide a graph-theoretical interpretation of users;; efforts at the Nash equilibria, Pareto efficient outcomes, and semi-cooperative equilibria of these games, by linking users;; effort decisions to their centralities in the interaction network. Using this characterization, we separate the effects of users;; dependencies and influences (outgoing and incoming edges, respectively) on their effort levels, and uncover an alternating effect over walks of different length in the network. We also propose the design of inter-temporal incentives in a particular type of security games, namely, security information sharing agreement. We show that either public or private assessments can be used in designing incentives for participants to disclose their information in these agreements. Finally, we present a method for crowdsourcing reputation that can be useful in attaining assessments of users;; efforts in security games.