Battlefield transfers in coalitional Blotto games

Abstract

In this work, we consider the framework of coalitional Blotto games in which two players compete against a common adversary by allocating their budgeted resources across disjoint sets of valued battlefields; the agent that allocates a higher amount wins the corresponding battlefield value. At the beginning of the game, the budgets of the agents and the values of the battlefields are specified. In the first stage, the players are allowed to perform a battlefield transfer in which one player offloads a number of its battlefields onto the other player. In the second stage, the adversary observes this transfer and determines how to allocate their budget accordingly. Finally, in the third stage, the players and the adversary allocate their budgets to their battlefields, the game is played, and their payoffs are realized. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a battlefield transfer that strictly increases the payoff of each player. We then augment the model, allowing players to not only transfer subsets of battlefields, but also portions of their budget, in the first stage. We also provide sufficient conditions for the existence of a joint transfer of battlefields and budgets. The results demonstrate that in almost all game instances, both players would benefit from such a joint transfer