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Attack, defence, and contagion in networks


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Type

Article

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Authors

Vigier, A 

Abstract

Connections between individuals facilitate the exchange of goods, resources and information and create benefi ts. These connections may be exploited by adversaries to spread their attacks as well. What is the optimal way to design and defend networks in the face of attacks? We develop a model with a Designer and an Adversary. The Designer moves fi rst and chooses a network and an allocation of defense resources across nodes. The Adversary then allocates attack resources on nodes; if an attack succeeds then the Adversary decides on how successful resources should navigate the network. We obtain two principal results. One, we show that in a wide variety of circumstances a star network with all defence resources allocated to the central node is optimal for the Designer. Two, we identify conditions on the technology of conflict, network value function and the resource con guration for which networks with multiple hubs/components are optimal.

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Keywords

38 Economics, 3801 Applied Economics, 3802 Econometrics, 3803 Economic Theory

Journal Title

Review of Economic Studies

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0034-6527
1467-937X

Volume Title

81

Publisher

Oxford University Press (OUP)
Sponsorship
Sanjeev Goyal acknowledges support from a Keynes Fellowship, Cambridge-INET Institute and European Research Area Complexity-Net (`Resilience and interaction of networks in ecology and economics'). Adrien Vigier acknowledges support from a Gates Cambridge Fellowship as well as a CORE fellowship from Universite Catholique de Louvain.