The Economics of Information Security and Privacy
Abstract
In the late 1990s, researchers began to grasp that the roots of many information security failures can be better explained with the language of economics than by pointing to instances of technical flaws. This led to a thriving new interdisciplinary research field combining economic and engineering insights, measurement approaches and methodologies to ask fundamental questions concerning the viability of a free and open information society. While economics and information security comprise the nucleus of an academic movement that quickly drew the attention of thinktanks, industry, and governments, the field has expanded to surrounding areas such as management of information security, privacy, and, more recently, cybercrime, all studied from an interdisciplinary angle by combining methods from microeconomics, econometrics, qualitative social sciences, behavioral sciences, and experimental economics.