Can revealing one's competitive capabilities to an opponent offer strategic benefits? In this paper, we address this question in the context of General Lotto games, a class of two-player competitive resource allocation models. We consider an asymmetric information setting where the opponent is uncertain about the resource budget of the other player, and holds a prior belief on its value. We assume the other player, called the signaler, is able to send a noisy signal about its budget to the opponent. With its updated belief, the opponent then must decide to invest in costly resources that it will deploy against the signaler's resource budget in a General Lotto game. We derive the subgame perfect equilibrium to this extensive-form game. In particular, we identify necessary and sufficient conditions for which a signaling policy improves the signaler's resulting performance in comparison to the scenario where it does not send any signal. Moreover, we provide the optimal signaling policy when these conditions are met. Notably we find that for some scenarios, the signaler can effectively double its performance.

翻译：向对手揭示自身竞争能力是否能带来战略优势？本文在通用Lotto博弈（一类双人竞争性资源分配模型）中探讨这一问题。我们考虑一种非对称信息场景，其中对手对另一方的资源预算存在不确定性，并持有其价值的先验信念。假设该另一方（称为信号发送方）能够向对手发送关于其预算的噪声信号。对手在更新信念后，必须决定是否投资于成本高昂的资源，并在通用Lotto博弈中将其部署以对抗信号发送方的资源预算。我们推导了该扩展式博弈的子博弈完美均衡。具体而言，我们识别了信号策略能提升信号发送方绩效（相较于不发送任何信号的情形）的充要条件。此外，我们给出了满足这些条件时的最优信号策略。值得注意的是，我们发现某些场景下信号发送方可将绩效有效提升一倍。