Applications of Inspection Games

Abstract

An inspection game is a mathematical model of a non‐cooperative situation where an inspector verifies that another party, called inspectee, adheres to legal rules. The inspector wishes to deter illegal activity on the part of the inspectee and, should illegal activity nevertheless take place, detect it with the highest possible probability and as soon as possible. The inspectee may have some incentive to violate his commitments and violation, if observed, will incur punishment. Therefore if he chooses illegal behaviour, the inspectee will wish to avoid detection with the highest possible probability. Three examples of applications are presented. The first one deals with random controls in public transportation systems. The second one describes the problem of verification of arms control and disarmament in a very general way. The third one deals with inspections over time which are important in the context of non‐proliferation verification.

Information accuracy in legislative oversight: Theoretical implications and experimental evidence

“…In the other fields of social sciences, there exists an analogous decision-making structure, the so-called inspection game (Dresher, 1962). 2 In its general form, this game is a mathematical model of a situation where an inspection authority, called inspector, verifies that another party, called inspectee, adheres to certain legal rules (Avenhaus, 2004: 179). For example, social researchers used this model to explore whether more severe penalties are helpful in reducing the crime rate in a society (e.g.…”

“… 1. Oversight games have been applied to a variety of different contexts, such as arms control (Avenhaus, 2004), police control (Andreozzi, 2004), business administration (Fandel and Trockel, 2011), and smuggling (Hohzaki, 2011). …”

Fare Evasion and Ticket Forgery in Public Transport: Insights from Germany, Austria and Switzerland

“…More recently, a series of studies have examined the impacts of reducing the amount of physical control over ticketing, examining the trade-off between the potential costs (revenue lost from fare evasion, increased salaries for ticket inspections) and benefits (speed and reliability improvements, reduced stop dwell time, increased ridership, lower vehicle operational and purchase costs) [16,17] as well fare evader behaviour [18,19]. Theoretical modelling to address fare evasion and ticket forgery is quite popular, usually using econometric approaches or game-theory [20][21][22], however these studies often focus on mathematically estimating the optimal inspection rate or patrol location to reduce fare evasion or maximise profit [23][24][25].…”

Designing Biosecurity Inspection Regimes to Account for Stakeholder Incentives: An Inspection Game Approach

“…Variants of inspection games have been applied in several settings, including public transport ticketing (e.g. Avenhaus, 2004;Delle Fave et al, 2014), financial auditing (e.g. Besancenot & Vranceanu, 2007;Krawczyk, 2009;Chou et al, 2012), doping in sports (e.g.…”