Title: Intention Games,
Abstract: Strategic interactions between competitive entities are generally considered
from the perspective of complete revelations of benefits achieved from those
interactions, in the form of public payoff functions in the announced games. In
this work, we propose a formal framework for a competitive ecosystem where each
player is permitted to deviate from publicly optimal strategies under certain
private payoffs greater than public payoffs, given that these deviations have
certain acceptable bounds as agreed by all players. We call this game theoretic
construction an Intention Game. We formally define an Intention Game, and
notions of equilibria that exist in such deviant interactions. We give an
example of a Cournot competition in a partially honest setting. We compare
Intention Games with conventional strategic form games. Finally, we give a
cryptographic use of Intention Games and a dual interpretation of this novel
framework.