Equilibria of the Colonel Blotto Games with Costs

Speaker(s)

Stach Kaźmierowski

Affiliation

University of Warsaw

Language of the talk

English

Date

May 29, 2025, noon

Information about the event

online seminar

Seminar

Seminar Games, Mechanisms, and Social Networks

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We study a generalized variant of the Colonel Blotto game, referred to as the Colonel Blotto game with costs. Unlike the classic Colonel Blotto game, which imposes the use-it-or-lose-it budget assumption, the Colonel Blotto game with costs captures the strategic importance of costs related both to obtaining resources and assigning them across battlefields. We show that every instance of the Colonel Blotto game with costs is strategically equivalent to an instance of the zero-sum Colonel Blotto game with one additional battlefield. This enables the computation of Nash equilibria of the Colonel Blotto game with costs in polynomial time with respect to the game parameters: the number of battlefields and the number of resources available to the players.

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