Parole Board Decision-Making using Adversarial Risk Analysis

Abstract

Adversarial Risk Analysis (ARA) allows for much more realistic modeling of game theoretical decision problems than Bayesian game theory. While ARA solutions for various applications have been discussed in the literature, we have not encountered a manuscript that assesses ARA in a real-life case study involving actual decision-makers. In this study, we present an ARA solution for the Parole Board decision problem. To elicit the Parole Board’s probabilities and utilities regarding the convict’s choices and resulting consequences, as well as their own subjective beliefs about such probabilities and utilities, we conducted a detailed interview with two current members of the New Zealand Parole Board, using a realistic case report. Subsequently, we derived the optimal ARA decision for different scenarios. This study highlights the advantages and challenges of the ARA methodology for real-life decision-making in the presence of an adversary.

KEYWORDS:

• Adversarial risk analysis
• Decision-making
• Expert elicitation
• Parole
• Prior elicitation
• Utility elicitation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the New Zealand Parole Board for their participation in this study. This research was partially conducted when the first and the second authors were based at the University of Waikato, and completed while the third author was visiting the first author at the University of Auckland. We thank the University of Waikato for providing travel funding to conduct the case study.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Note

Notes

1 A well-known NZ gang—the actual gang name has been withheld for publication.

Additional information

Funding

Third author’s travel was supported by grants from URJC’s mobility programs.