General Lotto Games with Scouts: Information versus Strength
<|reference_start|>General Lotto Games with Scouts: Information versus Strength: We introduce General Lotto games with Scouts: a General Lotto game with asymmetric information. There are two players, Red and Blue, who both allocate resources to a field. However, scouting capabilities afford Blue to gain information, with some probability, on the number of Red's resources before allocating his own. We derive optimal strategies for this game in the case of a single field. In addition we provide upper and lower bounds of the value of the game in a multi-stage case with multiple battlefields. We devise several ways to characterise the influence of information versus strength. We conclude by drawing qualitative insights from these characterisations and the game values, and draw parallels with military practice.<|reference_end|>
@article{brethouwer2024general,
    title={General Lotto Games with Scouts: Information versus Strength},
    author={Jan-Tino Brethouwer, Bart van Ginkel and Roy Lindelauf},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.05841},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2404.05841},
    primaryClass={cs.GT}
}