An Experimental Investigation of Colonel Blotto Games

Subhasish Chowdhury, Dan Kovenock and Roman M. Sheremeta

No 2688, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This article examines behavior in the two-player, constant-sum Colonel Blotto game with asymmetric resources in which players maximize the expected number of battlefields won. The experimental results support all major theoretical predictions. In the auction treatment, where winning a battlefield is deterministic, disadvantaged players use a “guerilla warfare” strategy which stochastically allocates zero resources to a subset of battlefields. Advantaged players employ a “stochastic complete coverage” strategy, allocating random, but positive, resource levels across the battlefields. In the lottery treatment, where winning a battlefield is probabilistic, both players divide their resources equally across all battlefields.

Keywords: Colonel Blotto; conflict resolution; contest theory; multi-dimensional resource allocation; rent-seeking; experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C91 D72 D74 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp2688.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: An experimental investigation of Colonel Blotto games (2013)
Working Paper: An Experimental Investigation of Colonel Blotto Games (2011)
Working Paper: An experimental investigation of Colonel Blotto games (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_2688

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().