A Relative Cost-Benefit Approach for Evaluating Alternative Airport Security Policies

While careful and prudent settings for airport security policies and strategies are more important than ever, most of them have been implemented as a direct result of terrorist activities rather than motivated by a proper assessment. Furthermore, even if many scholars have proposed ways to assess and evaluate alternative airport security policies particularly by using cost-benefit analysis, they have overlooked two important facets: parameter measurability and social aspects of security policies. In this study, we develop a variant of cost-benefit analysis which we term "Relative Cost-Benefit Analysis" and illustrate how we can resolve these problems.