Intention Games

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.