The Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences Colloquium Series presents

“Stochastic Asymmetric Blotto Games: Theory and Experimental Evidence”
with John Duffy, Professor of Economics, UC Irvine

Thursday, October 30, 2014
4:00–5:00 p.m.
Social Science Plaza A, Room 2112

Duffy considers a model where two players compete for items having different common values in a Blotto game. Players have to decide how to allocate their budgets across all items. The winner of each item is determined stochastically using a lottery mechanism. He analyzes two payoff objectives: (i) players aim to maximize their total expected payoff and (ii) players maximize the probability of winning  a majority value of all items. He develops some new theoretical results for the majority rule case and show that the majority rule objective results in qualitatively different equilibrium behavior than the total expected payoff objective. He reports the results of an experiment where the two payoff mechanisms are compared and we find strong support for the theoretical predictions.

For further information, please contact Joanna Kerner, kernerj@uci.edu or 949.824.8651.