Editorial: economic and industrial espionage

Industrial Espionage with a Noisy Intelligence

We analyze industrial espionage in a model of two firms: a monopoly incumbent, M, and a potential entrant, E, who owns a noisy intelligence system (IS) of a certain precisionα . The IS generates a signal on M’s action and E decides whether or not to enter based on this signal. We show that ifα is commonly known, M is the one who benefits from a perfect IS and E who spies on M prefers a less acc...

Editorial: Economic Decline and the Relevance of Industrial Geography

The current economic downturn presents a challenge for industrial geographers, a trying time that has multiple dimensions. First, as members of society, we cannot help but be impacted by the economic circumstances that for many of us are without parallel in our lifetimes. The lives of millions of people are being affected by bankruptcy, foreclosure, and job loss, and for many there may be littl...

Industrial Espionage from Residual Data: Risks and Countermeasures

This paper outlines the possible recovery of potentially sensitive corporate information from residual data. It outlines previous work on the recovery of information contained on second hand hard disks and handheld devices and discusses the risk of individuals conducting industrial espionage by targeting specific organizations. It examines the possible avenues for an attacker to obtain a storag...

Enlightened Secrets: Silk, Intelligent Travel, and Industrial Espionage in Eighteenth-Century France

Games with espionage

We consider normal form games in which two players decide on their strategies before the start of play and Player 1 can purchase noisy information about his opponent’s decisions concerning future response policies (i.e., spy on his opponent). We give a full characterization of the set of distributions over the players’ payo¤s that can be induced by such equilibria, as well as describe their wel...