Strategic Defense and Attack for Series and Parallel Reliability Systems: Comment

Hausken (2008a) formulates a contest-theoretic model of the attack and defense of a network of targets. This note identies a technical error that invalidates Hausken's characterization of Nash equilibrium for a substantial portion of the parameter space that he examines and provides necessary conditions for his solution to form a pure- strategy Nash equilibrium. Many of the existing results in the contest-theoretic liter- ature on the attack and defense of networks of targets rely upon Hausken's (2008a) characterization and require corresponding parameter restrictions. When these restric- tions are not met, the analysis of Clark and Konrad (2007) and Kovenock and Roberson (2010a) provides a foundation for constructing mixed-strategy Nash equilibria.