The Art of Concession in General Lotto Games

Rahul Chandan (), Keith Paarporn (), Dan Kovenock, Mahnoosh Alizadeh () and Jason Marden ()
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Rahul Chandan: University of California, Santa Barbara
Keith Paarporn: University of California, Santa Barbara
Mahnoosh Alizadeh: University of California, Santa Barbara
Jason Marden: University of California, Santa Barbara

Working Papers from Chapman University, Economic Science Institute

Abstract: Success in adversarial environments often requires investment into additional resources in order to improve one’s competitive position. But, can intentionally decreasing one’s own competitiveness ever provide strategic benefits in such settings? In this paper, we focus on characterizing the role of “concessions†as a component of strategic decision making. Specifically, we investigate whether a player can gain an advantage by either conceding budgetary resources or conceding valuable prizes to an opponent. While one might na¨ıvely assume that the player cannot, our work demonstrates that – perhaps surprisingly – concessions do offer strategic benefits when made correctly. In the context of General Lotto games, we first show that neither budgetary concessions nor value concessions can be advantageous to either player in a 1-vs.-1 scenario. However, in settings where two players compete against a common adversary, we find opportunities for one of the two players to improve her payoff by conceding a prize to the adversary. We provide a set of sufficient conditions under which such concessions exist.

Keywords: General Lotto; Colonel Blotto; game; system security; defense; strategic pre-commitment; concession (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D74 H56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-spo
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:chu:wpaper:21-24

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