Stackelberg production-protection games: Defending crop production against intentional attacks

Inspired by recent terrorist attacks on cereal production fields in Iraq, we introduce and study two types of Stackelberg games. In these games, the leader wants to maximize its production (e.g., cereal), while the follower tries to destroy this production as much as possible. In the first model, the leader can protect its production by spreading his production resources over multiple regions. In the second model, the leader can also decide to allocate some extra protection resources to the regions. For both games, we are interested in a follower's and leader's optimal strategy. We characterise optimal strategies for the follower and present two linear time algorithms (one for each game) that find an optimal strategy for the leader. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )