Modeling state-dependent priorities of malicious agents

With ever-increasing terror threats, governments and security officials would benefit from a better understanding of what motivates terrorists to cause social unrest. A recent research trend is on gaining greater knowledge about the values of malicious agents to help manage the risk of terrorism. As a result, there seems to be the potential to use decision analysis as a means to model what may drive malicious agents to commit harmful actions. So far, research on this topic has assumed static preferences of such agents. In this paper, we present a framework that may be used to infer how terrorists' priorities may change over time and their impact on their choice of a harmful action. We suggest modeling state-dependent priorities of a terrorist group via a multicriteria model that incorporates state-dependent priorities to account for preference change caused by exogenous triggers and representing the environment as a system dynamics model. We describe how terrorists' visceral factors may affect the prioritization of objectives and show how such an analysis may support risk management in this context.