Article ID: | iaor20014122 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 131 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 208 |
End Page Number: | 223 |
Publication Date: | May 2001 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Avenhaus Rudolf, Canty Morton John, Rothenstein Daniel |
Keywords: | inspection |
Verification of compliance to formal agreements requires the performance of routine inspections for detection of illegal behavior. Deterrence of violations is generally taken to be the primary objective of any verification regime. If the inspections are carried out in such a way that the gain the inspectee may expect from illegal behavior is smaller than that for behaving legally, then the inspections may indeed be said to have deterred violation. In this paper inspection problems characterized additionally by a ‘critical time’ are considered for the first time in this context. The critical time is the maximum time interval within which illegal activity must be detected in order to meet the objectives of the agreement. Critically time-dependent inspection problems are modeled as two-person non-cooperative games between inspector and inspectee. They extend over a reference time interval in which the inspector performs by agreement precisely