President Obama's Offshore Drilling Policy and Energy Security: A Game-Theoretic Policy Analysis.

In the post-9/11 era, security has become a primary collective concern for governments, communities, industry, policy analysts, NGOs, and decision-makers. A powerful confluence of ideas from the fields of sustainable development, environmental justice, ecological engineering, political ecology, and energy security is transforming US national security policy. It is shown that the decision whether or not to expand offshore drilling in the US involves complex multi-criteria negotiation processes, many decision-makers (with conflicting priorities and dynamic preferences), high decision stakes, limited technical information (both in terms of quality and quantity), and difficult tradeoffs. Specifically, this paper applies advances in game-theoretic decision-making to President Obama's March 2010 decision to open new coastal areas of the US to drilling for offshore oil and gas. Our findings can be applied to environmental, political, energy, and socio-economic decision-making at strategic, operational, and tactical levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]