Strategic Incentives in Biosecurity Actions: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses

We model a game between two players taking biosecurity actions and characterize the Nash equilibria and their properties for the cases of strategic complements and substitutes. Implications of the theoretical model are investigated using data for biosecurity behavior among producers participating in a livestock exhibition. Biosecurity actions with own benefits and lasting impacts in home communities exhibit a positive relationship with behavior of the producers from geographically close areas. The number and probabilities of biosecurity actions taken by exhibitors are positively associated with the number of animals exhibited and they vary among commercial and hobby producers and across species/types of commercial production.