Papers for

competitive marketing teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Alliances stay valuable despite uncertainty in resource competition

Forming Alliances in the Fog of War: A General Lotto Perspective

Abstract: Agents competing against a common opponent can often gain an edge by forming alliances, but deciding whether to do so is difficult when they lack precise knowledge about their opponent or ally. We study how uncertainty affects opportunities for alliance formation in the coalitional General Lotto game, in which two players compete aganist a shared adversary by allocating their resource budgets over separate sets of valued contests. When all agents know one another's budgets, it is known that a budget transfer from one player to the other can benefit both players. We ask whether such alliances survive when the players know the relevant budgets only up to a multiplicative factor. Under two models, one in which the players are uncertain about the adversary's budget and one in which they are uncertain about each other's budgets, we characterize exactly which games admit a transfer that benefits both players in every game consistent with what they conjecture to be possible. In both models, we show that such robust transfers exist in a set of games of positive measure for every level of uncertainty. These results suggest that alliances can remain worthwhile even when allies are largely in the dark.

Wed 30 SeptComputer Science and Game Theory
The gist
Sometimes, people or groups team up to beat a common opponent. But it's hard to decide to join forces when they don't know exactly how strong their ally or enemy is. The authors study a game where two players use their limited resources to compete against a third player with shared interests. They find that even when players only have rough estimates of each other's resources, there are still ways to share resources that help both teammates come out ahead. This means teamwork can work well even when players don’t have perfect information.
Open → 2610.00608v1