 Colonel Blotto's Tug of WarNo 2021-3, Working Papers from University of Alberta, Department of Economics Abstract: We examine Tug of War contests with the Blotto specification. Players have fixed effort budgets and must allocate these budgets to a sequence of battles. The outcome of each battle is a function of the efforts allocated to that battle. The player who first wins L more battles than the opponent wins the contest. We prove the one-step deviation principle for the undiscounted version of this game. We then derive a pure strategy, subgame perfect equilibrium for the case where the contest success function that governs each battle is a generalized Tullock function with exponent 1/2 or less. In the equilibrium, the players invest the same percentage of their remaining resources into each battle. The value of this percentage depends on how close each player is to winning the contest. Escalation of efforts, measured in relation to the players' remaining budgets, occurs when the player with the smaller budget is close to winning. At the same time, the probability that a player wins any individual battle remains constant along the entire equilibrium path. Keywords: Tug of War games; Colonel Blotto games; sequential contests; multibattle contests (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:albaec:2021_003 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from University of Alberta, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC. |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.