An inspection game is a mathematical model of a situation where a person or an organization, in the following called Inspectorate, verifies that another party, maybe a person, an organization or even a State, and in the following called Operator, adheres to certain agreed or legal rules. The Operator may, however, have an interest in violating these agreed rules. Typically, the Inspectorate's resources are limited so that verification can only be partial. A mathematical analysis helps in designing an optimal inspection scheme, where it must be assumed that an illegal activity is planned strategically. This defines a game theoretical problem between the two players, Operator and Inspectorate. In the 2018 INMM conference the author and R. Avenhaus discussed the Dresher and the Thomas-Nisgav inspection game. These are two discrete time critical time Se-Se inspection games, where Se-Se means that the Operator resp. the Inspectorate decide during the course of the game when to behave illegally (if at all) resp. when to perform the inspections. I.e., they both plan sequentially (Se-Se). To complement the 2018 paper, this paper focuses on a discrete time critical time Se-No inspection game, i.e., the Operator decides again sequentially during the course of the game, and the Inspectorate decides only at the beginning of the game when to carry out its inspections. The aim of this paper is to carefully model this Se-No inspection game and to determine optimal strategies and the optimal payoffs of both players. The results are related to the results of the 2018 conference paper, where especially the sensitivity of the optimal strategies and the optimal payoffs on the model assumption (Se-No versus Se-Se) is discussed.
Year
2020
Abstract