Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Strategic decisions are often made over multiple periods of time, wherein decisions made earlier impact a competitor's success in later stages. In this article, we study these dynamics in General Lotto games, a class of models describing the competitive allocation of resources between two opposing players. We propose a two-stage formulation where one of the players has reserved resources that can be strategicallypreallocatedacross the battlefields in the first stage of the game as reinforcements. The players then simultaneously allocate their remainingreal-timeresources, which can be randomized, in a decisive final stage. Our main contributions provide complete characterizations of the optimal reinforcement strategies and resulting equilibrium payoffs in these multistage General Lotto games. Interestingly, we determine that real-time resources are at least twice as effective as reinforcement resources when considering equilibrium payoffs.
Language: English
Topic: Game Theory and Applications
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4402978257