Effects of a Player's Awareness of Information Acquisition and Ability to Change Strategy in Attrition Games

Abstract

This paper deals with a two-person zero-sum (TPZS) attrition game on a network in which attackers depart from a start node and attempt to reach a destination node while defenders deploy to intercept the attackers. Both players incur some attrition due to conflict between them, but the payoff of the game is the number of surviving attackers reaching the destination. We generate a system of models categorized according to various scenarios of the player's information acquisition (IA) about his opponent and derive linear programming formulations for the equilibria of the models. Comparing the equilibria, we evaluate the values of the situations around the IA in a comprehensive manner.