Divide and Rule: Investigating the trade-offs between targetability and public goods provision in Blotto games.

How does information about voters impact policy decisions made by politicians? It allows for politicians to improve public policy decisions, but also to locate exactly the voters necessary to get elected. This paper investigates a variation on the Colonel Blotto game that captures this trade-off: parties can choose between providing a public good that benefits everyone, or they can offer transfers that benefit only the groups at which they are targeted. Increasing targetability is modeled as increasing the number (and thus decreasing the size) of individual groups that can be offered transfers. It finds that as long as the groups are not perfectly symmetric, increasing targetability makes using transfers more attractive from the perspective of the party.