Inefficient Alliance Formation in Coalitional Blotto Games

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Shah, Vade, Paarporn, Keith, Marden, Jason R.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Shah, Vade
Paarporn, Keith
Marden, Jason R.
author_facet Shah, Vade
Paarporn, Keith
Marden, Jason R.
contents When multiple agents are engaged in a network of conflict, some can advance their competitive positions by forming alliances with each other. However, the costs associated with establishing an alliance may outweigh the potential benefits. This study investigates costly alliance formation in the framework of coalitional Blotto games, in which two players compete separately against a common adversary, and are able to collude by exchanging resources with one another. Previous work has shown that both players in the alliance can mutually benefit if one player unilaterally donates, or transfers, a portion of their budget to the other. In this letter, we consider a variation where the transfer of resources is inherently inefficient, meaning that the recipient of the transfer only receives a fraction of the donation. Our findings reveal that even in the presence of inefficiencies, mutually beneficial transfers are still possible. More formally, our main result provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of such transfers, offering insights into the robustness of alliance formation in competitive environments with resource constraints.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_06899
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Inefficient Alliance Formation in Coalitional Blotto Games
Shah, Vade
Paarporn, Keith
Marden, Jason R.
Computer Science and Game Theory
When multiple agents are engaged in a network of conflict, some can advance their competitive positions by forming alliances with each other. However, the costs associated with establishing an alliance may outweigh the potential benefits. This study investigates costly alliance formation in the framework of coalitional Blotto games, in which two players compete separately against a common adversary, and are able to collude by exchanging resources with one another. Previous work has shown that both players in the alliance can mutually benefit if one player unilaterally donates, or transfers, a portion of their budget to the other. In this letter, we consider a variation where the transfer of resources is inherently inefficient, meaning that the recipient of the transfer only receives a fraction of the donation. Our findings reveal that even in the presence of inefficiencies, mutually beneficial transfers are still possible. More formally, our main result provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of such transfers, offering insights into the robustness of alliance formation in competitive environments with resource constraints.
title Inefficient Alliance Formation in Coalitional Blotto Games
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06899