Generalizations of the General Lotto and Colonel Blotto Games
Economic Science Institute Working Paper No. 15-07
39 Pages Posted: 27 Mar 2015
There are 2 versions of this paper
Generalizations of the General Lotto and Colonel Blotto Games
Generalizations of the General Lotto and Colonel Blotto Games
Date Written: March 23, 2015
Abstract
In this paper, we generalize the General Lotto game (budget constraints satisfied in expectation) and the Colonel Blotto game (budget constraints hold with probability one) to allow for battlefield valuations that are heterogeneous across battlefields and asymmetric across players, and for the players to have asymmetric resource constraints. We completely characterize Nash equilibrium in the generalized version of the General Lotto game and then show how this characterization can be applied to identify equilibria in the Colonel Blotto version of the game. In both games, we find that there exist sets of non-pathological parameter configurations of positive Lebesgue measure with multiple payoff nonequivalent equilibria.
Keywords: Colonel Blotto game, General Lotto game, Multi-battle contest, Redistributive politics, All-pay auction
JEL Classification: C72, D72, D74
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation