How to detect a salami slicer: a stochastic controller-stopper game with unknown competition
Abstract
We consider a stochastic game of control and stopping specified in terms of a process , representing the holdings of Player 1, where is a Brownian motion, is a Bernoulli random variable indicating whether Player 2 is active or not, and is a non-decreasing process representing the accumulated "theft" or "fraud" performed by Player 2 (if active) against Player 1. Player 1 cannot observe or directly, but can merely observe the path of the process and may choose a stopping rule to deactivate Player 2 at a cost . Player 1 thus does not know if she is the victim of fraud and operates in this sense under unknown competition. Player 2 can observe both and and seeks to choose the fraud strategy that maximizes the expected discounted amount whereas Player 1 seeks to choose the stopping strategy so as to minimize the expected discounted cost This non-zero-sum game appears to be novel and is motivated by applications in fraud detection; it combines filtering (detection), non-singular control, stopping, strategic features (games) and asymmetric information. We derive Nash equilibria for this game; for some parameter values we find an equilibrium in pure strategies, and for other parameter values we find an equilibrium by allowing for randomized stopping strategies.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2010.03619,
title = {How to detect a salami slicer: a stochastic controller-stopper game with unknown competition},
author = {Erik Ekström and Kristoffer Lindensjö and Marcus Olofsson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.03619},
year = {2020}
}