Stealthy strategies for deception in hypergames with asymmetric information

This paper considers games with incomplete asymmetric information, where one player (the deceiver) has privileged information about the other (the mark) and intends to employ it for belief manipulation. We use hypergames to represent the asymmetric information available to players and assume a probabilistic model for the actions of the mark. This framework allows us to formalize various notions of deception in a precise way. We provide a necessary condition and a sufficient condition for deceivability when the deceiver is allowed to reveal information to the mark as the game evolves. For the case when the deceiver acts stealthily, i.e., restricts her actions to those that do not contradict the belief of the mark, we are able to fully characterize when deception is possible. Moreover, we design the worst-case max-strategy that, when such a sequence of deceiving actions exists, is guaranteed to find it. An example illustrates our results.