English

On the Sn/n-Problem

Probability 2021-10-07 v3

Abstract

The Chow-Robbins game is a classical still partly unsolved stopping problem introduced by Chow and Robbins in 1965. You repeatedly toss a fair coin. After each toss, you decide if you take the fraction of heads up to now as a payoff, otherwise you continue. As a more general stopping problem this reads V(n,x)=supτE[x+Sτn+τ]V(n,x) = \sup_{\tau }\operatorname{E} \left [ \frac{x + S_\tau}{n+\tau}\right] where SS is a random walk. We give a tight upper bound for VV when SS has subgassian increments. We do this by usinf the analogous time continuous problem with a standard Brownian motion as the driving process. From this we derive an easy proof for the existence of optimal stopping times in the discrete case. For the Chow-Robbins game we as well give a tight lower bound and use these to calculate, on the integers, the complete continuation and the stopping set of the problem for n105n\leq 10^{5}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1909.05762,
  title  = {On the Sn/n-Problem},
  author = {Sören Christensen and Simon Fischer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.05762},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:13:40.617Z