Games with Planned Actions and Scouting

TL;DR

This paper explores how planning, information revelation, and deception in games with pre-action preparations influence strategic outcomes and players' incentives, providing a new framework for analyzing simultaneous-move games with partial observability.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of games with planned actions and information updates, highlighting the strategic role of deception and camouflage in such settings.

Findings

Information over opponents' plans affects winning probabilities.

Deception and camouflage are incentivized by information asymmetries.

Decomposition of actions enables analysis of simultaneous-move games with partial observation.

Abstract

We study games in which every action requires planning and preparation. Moreover, before players act, they can revise their plans based on partially revealing information that they receive on their adversary's preparations. In turn, we examine how players' information over each others' planned actions influences winning odds in matching pennies games, and how it incentivises the use of decoys, deception, and camouflage. Across scenarios, we emphasize that the decomposition of an action into (i) a preparation to act and (ii) the execution of the action, allows to analyze one-shot simultaneous-move games, where players partially observe each others' contemporaneous actions.