Private Blotto: Viewpoint Competition with Polarized Agents

Authors: Kate Donahue, Jon Kleinberg

AAAI 2025 | Venue PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details

Reproducibility Variable Result LLM Response
Research Type Theoretical In this work, we propose and study the Private Blotto game, a variant with the key difference that individual agents act independently, without being coordinated by a central Colonel . We completely characterize the Nash stability of this game and how this impacts the amount of misallocated effort of users on unimportant items. We show that the outcome function (aggregating multiple labels on a single item) has a critical impact, and specifically contrast a majority rule outcome (the median) as compared to a smoother outcome function (mean).
Researcher Affiliation Academia 1Department of Computer Science, Cornell University 2Department of Information Science, Cornell University EMAIL, EMAIL
Pseudocode No The paper describes theoretical concepts, definitions, theorems, and lemmas, but it does not contain any structured pseudocode or algorithm blocks. Procedures are described in natural language.
Open Source Code Yes Code to reproduce figures and numerical examples is available at https://github.com/kpdonahue/private_blotto
Open Datasets No The paper discusses real-world scenarios such as social media platforms and the Community Notes tool on X.com as motivating examples, but it does not use or provide access to any specific datasets for empirical evaluation or experimentation. The work is theoretical.
Dataset Splits No The paper is theoretical and does not conduct experiments using datasets, therefore, there is no mention of dataset splits.
Hardware Specification No The paper primarily presents theoretical analysis and uses numerical examples for illustration. It does not provide any specific details about the hardware used to perform any computations or generate figures.
Software Dependencies No The paper does not provide specific software dependency details (e.g., library or solver names with version numbers) needed to replicate the numerical examples or any other part of the work, although code is provided in a separate repository.
Experiment Setup No The paper is theoretical and focuses on game-theoretic analysis. It provides definitions, theorems, and proofs. While it includes numerical examples, it does not describe a formal experimental setup with hyperparameters, training configurations, or other system-level settings.