A two-period material safeguards game

Safeguards problems are the problems of supervising the compliance of people, organizations, countries, etc. to rules limiting certain activities. Specific examples are: monitoring a point source of pollution and nuclear material control. A multi-stage game-theoretical model is suggested to analyze the material accounting situation. Under assumptions similar to those made in the statistical treatment, the two-period game has a unique (Nash) equilibrium point. Furthermore, except for some extreme configurations of the covariance structure of the measurement errors, the well established CUMUF statistical test is precisely the inspector’s strategy in equilibrium.