Strategically revealing intentions in General Lotto games

Abstract

In this paper, we highlight scenarios in General Lotto games where there exist incentives to reveal one's intentions to an opponent. The General Lotto game is a popular model of competitive resource allocation. We study a multi-step extension where one player has the option to publicly pre-commit resources to battlefields before play begins. In response, the opponent decides which of these battlefields to secure by matching the pre-commitment with its own resources, and which of them to withdraw from entirely. They then engage in a General Lotto game over the remaining set of battlefields. We show that the weaker-resource player never has an incentive to precommit, while a stronger player can have incentives to precommit. However, this is not necessarily true in settings where the battlefield valuations are asymmetric across players. This setting is known to admit a richer set of outcomes, where multiple payoff-distinct equilibria can arise in simultaneous play. We show that pre-committing in this environment can guarantee a payoff that exceeds the second-highest equilibrium payoff from simultaneous play. Our work highlights the strategic role that revealing information plays can have in a variety of adversarial contexts.

Analyzing pre-commitment strategies in General Lotto games

“…In comparison, our work provides explicit, analytical characterizations of equilibrium strategies, which draws sharper insights that relate the players' performance with the various elements of adversarial interaction. As such, our work is related to a recent research thread in which allocation decisions are made over multiple stages [4], [9], [10], [17], [19], [23], [26], [29].…”