Equilibrium characterizations of asymmetric Majoritarian contests*

Abstract

The General Lotto game is a well-studied model where two opposing players strategically allocate their resources to multiple battlefields. In its classic setting, each player's objective is to secure as much value as possible by winning many individual battlefields. However, in many applications, a player must secure particular subsets of battlefields in order to succeed. The classic setting fails to capture a variety of adversarial interactions – for instance, ensuring the security of networks or cyber-security domains. In this paper, we focus on a particular alternate player objective known as the majoritarian objective, where a player needs to secure a majority of battlefields in order to succeed. Equilibrium characterizations for the majoritarian objective in the existing literature are limited to particular symmetric settings where both players place the same value in succeeding. Our contributions extend these equilibrium solutions to asymmetric cases in two different settings: 1) both players have fixed and asymmetric resource budgets, and 2) both players place different values in succeeding and pay costs for allocating resources.