Analyzing pre-commitment strategies in General Lotto games

A salient feature of many optimal decision-making policies in adversarial environments is a level of unpredictability, or randomness, which keeps opponents uncertain about the system's strategies. These considerations, along with feedback from adversarial behaviors, are crucial in ensuring the security of modern infrastructures and complex systems. This paper considers policies that do just the opposite, namely ones that reveal strategic intentions to an opponent before engaging in competition. We consider such scenarios in the context of General Lotto games, which models the competitive allocation of resources between opposing players. Here, we consider a dynamic extension where one of the players has the option to publicly pre-commit assets to a battlefield in the first stage. In response, the opponent decides whether to secure the battlefield by matching the pre-commitment with its own resources, or to withdraw from it entirely. They then engage over the remaining set of battlefields in the second stage. We show that the weaker-resource player can have incentives to pre-commit when the battlefield values are asymmetric across players. Previous work asserts this never holds when the values are symmetric across players. Our analysis demonstrates the viability of alternate strategic mechanisms that a competitor may be able to employ.