Green Security Game with Community Engagement

While game-theoretic models and algorithms have been developed to combat illegal activities, such as poaching and over-fishing, in green security domains, none of the existing work considers the crucial aspect of community engagement: community members are recruited by law enforcement agencies as informants and can provide valuable tips, e.g., the location of ongoing illegal activities, to assist patrols. We fill this gap and (i) introduce a novel two-stage security game model for community engagement, with a bipartite graph representing the informant-attacker social network and a level k response model for attackers inspired by cognitive hierarchy; (ii) provide complexity results and exact, approximate, and heuristic algorithms for selecting informants and allocating patrollers against level-k (κ < ∞) attackers; (iii) provide a novel algorithm to find the optimal defender strategy against level-∞ attackers, which converts the problem of optimizing a parameterized fixed-point to a bi-level optimization problem, where the inner level is just a linear program, and the outer level has only a linear number of variables and a single linear constraint. We also evaluate the algorithms through extensive experiments.