Intention Games: Towards Strategic Coexistence between Partially Honest and Blind Players

TL;DR

This paper introduces Intention Games, a new game-theoretic framework allowing players to strategically defect from public strategies based on private payoffs, enabling more realistic modeling of competitive ecosystems with private incentives.

Contribution

It formally defines Intention Games, introduces participational equilibria, and demonstrates their application across various real-world competitive scenarios.

Findings

Intention Games generalize traditional strategic form games.

They enable modeling of private incentives and strategic defections.

Applications include Cournot competition, secure interactions, and Bitcoin mining.

Abstract

Strategic interactions between competitive entities are generally considered from the perspective of complete revelation of benefits achieved from those interactions, in the form of public payoff functions and/or beliefs, in the announced games. However, there exist strategic interplays between competitors where the players have a choice to strategise under the availability of private payoffs, in similar competitive settings. In this contribution, we propose a formal framework for a competitive ecosystem where each player is permitted to defect from publicly optimal strategies under certain private payoffs greater than announced payoffs, given that these defections have certain acceptable bounds in the long run as agreed by all players. We call this game theoretic construction an Intention Game. We formally define an Intention Game, and notions of participational equilibria that exist in such interactions that permit public defections. We compare Intention Games with conventional strategic form games, and demonstrate a type-theoretic construction of Intention Games. In a partially honest setting, we give Intention Game instances of a Cournot competition, secure interactions between mobile applications, an Internet services' data sourcing competition between Internet service providers through content delivery networks, and a Bitcoin mining competition. We give a use of Intention Games to determine player participation in a cryptographic protocol. Finally, we demonstrate the possibility of a dual model of the Intention Games framework.