End Game: Can Game Theory Help us Explain How a Statistical Disclosure Might Occur and Play Out

To fully account for the risk of a statistical disclosure occurring requires that we develop a better understanding of how a disclosure might occur and what its consequences might be. To do this we need to consider not just the target data but also the environment in which that data is produced and released. Through this we can identify and explore the events leading up to and following from a (claim of) disclosure. That is, we can move beyond modellingthe mechanisms of statistical disclosure to conceptualising and systematically representing disclosure events in their entirety. In this paper, we show how it is possible to apply a game theoretic reasoning to model disclosure events to examine how key agents in a disclosure event might interact to bring about particular outcomes. The paper gives a brief introduction to game theory and to how it might be applied to the disclosure event situation