Risk Assessment Method using a Game Theoretic Approach

Risk Assessment Method using a Game Theoretic Approach 
In 2010, the value of the North American search engine marketing market was estimated at .More recently, Deighton and Johnson [2] calculated that the search audience assembly sector contributes $19 billion to the US economy employing 82,000 employees. Search Engine Marketing is defined by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) as a:“...form of internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). SEM methods include: search engine optimization (SEO), paid placement, contextualadvertising, digital asset optimization, and paid inclusion” [3]. SEO, a method used in SEM, is the process of positively affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid ("organic") search results. While a large proportion of the focus on search engine optimization focuses on the two dominant search engines, Google® and Bing®, it should be noted that the landscape is extending as social networking sites integrate and expand the role of search functionality in their platforms, mobile penetration introduces new players, and international search engines such as Baidu® (China) and Yandex® (Russia) consolidate their positions in their respective markets. Techniques used by SEO practitioners (search engine optimizers) who operate within the guidelines of the search engines are known as ‘white-hat”; in contrast “black-hat” techniques are designed to manipulate search rankings [4]. Search engine providers apply penalties to websites that appear to be involved in behavior designed to manipulate search rankings. Given the rewards in terms of search engine traffic and resulting conversion associated with high search rankings, it is not surprising that many third parties offer “SEO services” which blur the lines of ethical practice. More recently, a new phenomenon has emerged, that of negative SEO. Negative SEO is where a third party applies SEO techniques that seek to exploit vulnerabilities in search engine ranking algorithms to negatively affect the ranking of a target website. Therefore a key contribution of our paper is that we define negative SEO and categorise common classes of negative SEO techniques. Game theory is not commonly used in marketing and no risk assessment models or frameworkswere identified that address this threat. As such, a second contribution of our paper is a proposed risk assessment framework for negative SEO using a game theoretic approach. We propose a model to determine the ideal offensive and defensive strategies for players in a negative SEO game. The model can be used by (i) marketers and other technical communicators, and (ii) those designing and operating search engines, to  Penalties vary depending on the type of behavior being penalized and the extent of the contravention. A search engine provider may display a warning within search results (or on an interstitial page when an end user clicks on a search result) where websites or pages appear to have been hacked and infected with badware. Where a website has a pattern of unnatural, artificial, deceptive or manipulative links pointing to it or features a large volume of user-generated spam in comments or forums may be artificially demoted in search rankings. Websites using hosting services with a significant fraction of spammy pages or websites hosted on those services may be removed from the search index altogether. Similarly, websites or pages who continue to infringe quality guidelines may be removed from the search index. SEO Company Kumbakonam

Gibbons [47] provides an introduction to game theory.Games are structured into a number of players, with each player having available to him or her number of strategies. A game will have a number of outcomes with each outcome corresponding to a combination of strategies, one selected by each player. Each outcome provides a payoff to each player. In the play of the game each player attempts to select a strategy that yields the maximum payoff to him or herself. Games can be classified as zero-sum whereby one player gains strictly at the expense of another player, or non-zero sum where the payoff to one player is independent of the payoffs to other players. Games are also classified according to the number of times that they are played: a game that is played once-only is known as a one-shot game; a game that is played many times between the same set of players is known as a repeated game. A third way to classify games is according to whether or not players can cooperate in determining their choices. Games where players make their decisions independently are known as non-cooperative games; games in which players collude are known as cooperative games. The techniques for solving these two kinds of games differ substantially. In this paper we are largely dealing with non-cooperative, one-shot, non zero-sum games. A fundamental concept in game theory is equilibrium. This is a stable state whereby none of the agents will wish to change their decision, given the choices made by the other agents. Such a state is known as a Nash equilibrium [48]. Special cases of the Nash equilibrium are the well-known prisoners’ dilemma game and the various kinds of coordination game, for example the chicken game [49].Games that are played repeatedly typically provide a greater number of equilibria than one-shot games. Repeated games offer agents a mechanism for extricating hemselves from the prisoners’ dilemma as the ‘shadow of the future’ influences agents current decision making behaviour [49]. This paper draws on two assumptions commonly adopted in game theory. Firstly it is assumed that each agent is rational i.e. each agent’s acts in its own best interest. In practice rationality implies that an agent will prefer a higher to a lower payoff for itself; the agent will never prefer a lower payoff to a higher one. The agent is unconcerned about the payoff to any other agent except insofar as it takes it into account in making its own decision. The second assumption is that knowledge of the game is available to all agents. No information is known to one agent and hidden to others: all information is ‘on the table’ and available to all.https://arudhrainnovations.com/