The multiplayer Colonel Blotto game

Enric Boix-Adserà, Benjamin L. Edelman and Siddhartha Jayanti

Games and Economic Behavior, 2021, vol. 129, issue C, 15-31

Abstract: We initiate the study of the natural multiplayer generalization of the classic continuous Colonel Blotto game. The two-player Blotto game, introduced by Borel (1953) as a model of resource competition across n simultaneous fronts, has been studied extensively for a century and has seen numerous applications throughout the social sciences. Our work defines the multiplayer Colonel Blotto game and derives Nash equilibria for various settings of k (number of players) and n. We also introduce a “Boolean” version of Blotto that becomes interesting in the multiplayer setting. The main technical difficulty of our work, as in the two-player theoretical literature, is the challenge of coupling various marginal distributions into a joint distribution satisfying a strict sum constraint. In contrast to previous works in the continuous setting, we derive our couplings algorithmically in the form of efficient sampling algorithms.

Keywords: Multiplayer equilibria; Blotto game; Equilibrium computation; Multiparty elections (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:129:y:2021:i:c:p:15-31

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2021.05.002

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