A Colonel Blotto Approach to Deterrence

David Grimsman, Keith Paarporn

Abstract: Deterrence games represent strategic interactions where a defender seeks to prevent an attacker from taking an undesired action by threatening credible retaliation or consequences. In this work, we propose a hierarchical Colonel Blotto game where the defender and attacker have soldiers that they can deploy to various battlefields. The novelty is that once deployed, the attacker soldiers act as decision-making entities who have structured incentives to either attack or defect. The incentives are modeled via a subgame, and are based on a reward for attacking, a penalty, and a probability of being caught. We analyze both levels of strategic interaction, deriving the equilibria for both the lower-level subgames and the higher-level Blotto game. We show under what circumstances the defender can exploit these dynamics through its allocation strategy in order to effectively deter the attacking soldiers from cooperating.

External IDs:dblp:conf/cdc/GrimsmanP25