Incorporating risk preferences into a defense-attack game

This paper studies a strategic game between a defender and an attacker. In particular, the defender distributes resources in deploying false targets, protecting the genuine target, and launching a preventive attack. The attacker distributes resources in protecting his own base from potential preventive attack and attacking the defender’s target. As an extension to existing studies, time, other than the efforts, is considered as an important factor which affects the players’ strategies. In addition, compared with traditional methods, both players base their decisions on the cumulative prospect value in terms of different outcomes. We characterize both the defender and attacker their best responses and equilibrium strategies. Comparative study shows the necessity of incorporating risk preferences into the defense-attack game. This paper provides novel insights to modeling and analyzing the optimal resource allocation to the defender-attacker game.