Date & Time: Los Angeles (8 am), Cincinnati (11 am), Bath (3 pm), Munich (4 pm), Beijing (11 pm), Singapore (11 pm), Sydney (March 17, 2 am)

Dong Quan Vu will present the paper titled "General Lotto Games with Favoritism: Competitions with Pre-allocations and Asymmetric Effectiveness" (joint work with Patrick Loiseau).

Abstract of the Paper:
We introduce the General Lotto game with favoritism---an extension of the famous Blotto/Lotto games. In this game, the winner-determination rule is generalized to include pre-allocations and asymmetry of the players' resources effectiveness on each battlefield. Such model captures various application scenarios, e.g., it can be used to model the valency and incumbency bias in electoral competitions. We focus on the Nash equilibrium. First, we consider the closely related model of all-pay auctions with favoritism and completely characterize its equilibrium. Based on this result, we prove the existence and show the construction of a set of optimal univariate distributions, which leads to the construction of an equilibrium of the General Lotto game with favoritism. We extend this result to the Colonel Blotto game with favoritism model and derive an approximate equilibrium. Finally, we propose an algorithm---based on the notion of winding number of parametric curves---to efficiently compute an approximation of the proposed optimal univariate distributions with arbitrarily small error.

Chair: Dan Kovenock, Co-Chair: Iryna Topolyan