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Colonel Blotto on Facebook: the effect of social relations on strategic interaction

Published: 22 June 2012 Publication History

Abstract

We study how social relations between people affect the way they play the famous resource allocation game called Colonel Blotto. We report the deployment of a Facebook application called "Project Waterloo" which allows users to invite both friends and strangers to play Colonel Blotto against them. Most previous empirical studies of Blotto have been performed in a laboratory environment and have typically employed monetary incentives to attract human subjects to play games. In contrast, our framework relies on reputation and entertainment incentives to attract players. Deploying the game on a social network allows us to capture the social relations between players and analyze their impact on the used strategies.
Following [1] we examine player strategies and contrast them with game theoretic predictions. We then investigate how strategies are affected by social relations. Our analysis reveals that knowledge of the opponent affects the strategies chosen by players and how well they perform in the game. We show that players with few Facebook friends tend to play more games and have a higher probability of winning, that players responding to a challenge in the game have a higher probability of winning than those initiating the game, and that the initiators of a game have a higher probability of defeating their friends than strangers.

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cover image ACM Conferences
WebSci '12: Proceedings of the 4th Annual ACM Web Science Conference
June 2012
531 pages
ISBN:9781450312288
DOI:10.1145/2380718
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 22 June 2012

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WebSci '12: Web Science 2012
June 22 - 24, 2012
Illinois, Evanston

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  • (2021)Age-related differences in strategic competitionScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-021-94626-211:1Online publication date: 28-Jul-2021
  • (2020)Learning to play no-press diplomacy with best response policy iterationProceedings of the 34th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems10.5555/3495724.3497234(17987-18003)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2020
  • (2020)Discovering Strategic Behaviors for Collaborative Content-Production in Social NetworksProceedings of The Web Conference 202010.1145/3366423.3380274(2078-2088)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2020
  • (2020)Colonel Blotto Games in Network Systems: Models, Strategies, and ApplicationsIEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering10.1109/TNSE.2019.29045307:2(637-649)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2020
  • (2019)Bounds and dynamics for empirical game theoretic analysisAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-019-09432-y34:1Online publication date: 4-Dec-2019
  • (2019)Strategic behavior and learning in all-pay auctionsAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-019-09402-433:1-2(192-215)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2019
  • (2018)A Generalised Method for Empirical Game Theoretic AnalysisProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3237383.3237402(77-85)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2018
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  • (2015)Social Network Analysis and Gaming: Survey of the Current State of ArtSerious Games10.1007/978-3-319-19126-3_14(158-169)Online publication date: 28-May-2015
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