Self-interested behavior from individuals can collectively lead to poor societal outcomes. These outcomes can seemingly be improved through the actions of altruistic agents, which benefit other agents in the system. However, it is known in specific contexts that altruistic agents can actually induce worse outcomes compared to a fully selfish population -- a phenomenon we term altruistic perversity. This paper provides a holistic investigation into the necessary conditions that give rise to altruistic perversity. In particular, we study the class of two-strategy population games where one sub-population is altruistic and the other is selfish. We find that a population game can admit altruistic perversity only if the associated social welfare function is convex and the altruistic population is sufficiently large. Our results are a first step in establishing a connection between properties of nominal agent interactions and the potential impacts from altruistic behaviors.

In this paper, we address this question in the context of General Lotto games, a class of two-player competitive resource allocation models. We consider an asymmetric information setting where the opponent is uncertain about the resource budget of the other player, and holds a prior belief on its value. We assume the other player, called the signaler, is able to send a noisy signal about its budget to the opponent. With its updated belief, the opponent then must decide to invest in costly resources that it will deploy against the signaler's resource budget in a General Lotto game. We derive the subgame perfect equilibrium to this extensive-form game. In particular, we identify necessary and sufficient conditions for which a signaling policy improves the signaler's resulting performance in comparison to the scenario where it does not send any signal. Moreover, we provide the optimal signaling policy when these conditions are met. Notably we find that for some scenarios, the signaler can effectively double its performance.