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Hi. In this set of lectures, what we're
going to do is we're going to talk about a

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game called the Colonel Blotto game. Now
there were two games that really got game

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three into the mainstream from policy
setting. The first one is the prisoner's

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dilemma. We'll talk about that in the next
set of lectures. The other is Colonel

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Blotto. Now the Colonel Blotto game is a
game that involves strategic mismatch. The

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idea is you've got a set of troops, your
opponent has a set of troops and you've

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gotta figure out where do I allocate my
troops given the other person. So, for

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instance, if you think about the Battle of
Waterloo. You've got two sets of troops.

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You've got the British troops, you've got
the French troops and they aligned them in

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different fronts trying to find
advantages. Or, if you look at Gettysburg,

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you're gonna Of the confederate union
army. Each one is placing their troops in

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different locations. They were just having
your strengths go against the weakness of

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your opponent. This is what is what Blotto
is trying to capture explicitly with

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troops against fronts. What we're going to
see in this lecture is that it's a very

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frugal [inaudible] model, so it can be
applied in a whole bunch of different

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settings. So what are we gonna do in these
lectures? We're gonna start out by

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describing just the basic Colonel Blotto
game Just the sort of vanilla version.

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After that, we're gonna talk about what
happens in Colonel Blotto if you give one

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side an advantage. So one side has 100
troops, another side has 200 troops. How

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much does it help you to have more troops?
Then what we'll do is we'll sort of move

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from that Colonel Blotto game and talk
generally about models of competition. So

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the previous set of lectures we talked
about skill versus luck and this finite

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memory lock model, And all this different
models of success and outcomes. We now

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have another one. Colonel [inaudible].
We'll see sort of how we can compare and

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contrast all these different models of
competition to get richer insights to

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figure out who wins and wh o losses and
why. Okay. So let's get started. What

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we're going to do in the first lecture is
talk about the basic game and see why

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Colonel [inaudible] is so interesting
across a variety of contexts.
