Toward Addressing Human Behavior with Observational Uncertainty in Security Games

Stackelberg games have recently gained significant attention for resource allocation decisions in security settings. One critical assumption of traditional Stackelberg models is that all players are perfectly rational and that the followers perfectly observe the leader’s strategy. However, in real-world security settings, security agencies must deal with human adversaries who may not always follow the utility maximizing rational strategy. Accounting for these likely deviations is important since they may adversely affect the leader’s (security agency’s) utility. In fact, a number of behavioral gametheoretic models have begun to emerge for these domains. Two such models in particular are COBRA (Combined Observability and Bounded Rationality Assumption) and BRQR (Best Response to Quantal Response), which have both been shown to outperform game-theoretic optimal models against human adversaries within a security setting based on Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Under perfect observation conditions, BRQR has been shown to be the leading contender for addressing human adversaries. In this work we explore these models under limited observation conditions. Due to human anchoring biases, BRQR’s performance may suffer under limited observation conditions. An anchoring bias is when, given no information about the occurrence of a discrete set of events, humans will tend to assign an equal weight to the occurrence of each event (a uniform distribution). This study makes three main contributions: (i) we incorporate an anchoring bias into BRQR to improve performance under limited observation; (ii) we explore finding appropriate parameter settings for BRQR under limited observation; (iii) we compare BRQR’s performance versus COBRA under limited observation conditions.