Abstract

We study Colonel Blotto games with sequential battles and amajoritarian objective. For a large class of contest success functions, theequilibrium is unique and characterized by an even split: Each battle that isreached before one of the players wins a majority of battles is allocated thesame amount of resources from the player's overall budget. As a consequence, aplayer's chance of winning any particular battle is independent of thebattlefield and of the number of victories and losses the player accumulated inprior battles. This result is in stark contrast to equilibrium behavior insequential contests that do not involve either fixed budgets or a majoritarianobjective. We also consider the equilibrium choice of an overall budget. Formany contest success functions, if the sequence of battles is long enough thepayoff structure in this extended games resembles an all-pay auction without noise.