Quantification and assessment method for a company's product piracy risks

Continuous globalization and consequent knowledge integration lead to drastically increasing risks of product piracy, which require further countermeasures, other than the reactive legal measures currently primarily employed. This paper addresses the risk quantification and assessment problem decision makers in industry, specifically engineering industry, are facing. The method introduced focuses on the identification of product portfolio and value chain risks and allows for the determination of the company specific risk situation. The deduction of combating strategy alternatives is combined with a novel quantitative cost-benefit analysis of protection mechanisms, which enables well-founded anti-counterfeit decision making. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.