When a terrorist group's aspirations far exceed the outcomes that can be expected to result from any of the available attack methods, an outcome below the terrorist group's aspiration level is inevitable. A primary prediction of SP/A theory when applied to the study of terrorist behaviour is...

From time to time, opinion pieces appear in the media that point out that the risk of being harmed by terrorism is very low. This much is true, at least from an actuarial perspective. These opinion pieces are often accompanied by lists of other, usually absurd, ways that a person is more likely...

When a terrorist group's aspirations far exceed the outcomes that can be expected to result from any of the available attack methods, an outcome below the terrorist group's aspiration level is inevitable. A primary prediction of SP/A theory when applied to the study of terrorist behaviour is...

This is an open source monograph about the economics of teams and the collection of intelligence in an espionage, counter-intelligence context. Our focus is decision-making, including search processes, under ambiguity or true uncertainty and the way that idiosyncratic human reactions to...

There have been calls to treat hackers as pirates and to enlist private companies as ‘privateers’ with the legal power to upend hacking operations. This led us to consider what our experience with maritime piracy can teach us about hackers and computer security. We found much of value in the...

We treat government concessions as additions to an expected payoffs schedule rather than as being synonymous with it. Government concessions that add to terrorists' expected payoffs past some point on a positively sloped risk-reward trade-off schedule will not make all terrorists more risk...

What we know about human decision-making under risk and uncertainty has expanded rapidly over the past forty years. Much of this work has been undertaken by psychologists and economists working together in the new field of behavioural economics. We work through the steps that led to the...

This paper addresses the question of why, in spite of their characteristics as ‘strong signals’, terrorism red flags can sometimes be missed. This represents a serious problem for counter-terrorism. By analysing the two phases of the investigative decision-making process, judgement and...

Given their technical sophistication, it is easy to overlook the human choices that underpin predictive policing algorithms and, importantly, the basic structures of decision theory that it embeds. To make a problem amenable to algorithmic computation, the problem must be transformed, often...