Related papers: Probabilities of competing binomial random variabl…
Two players alternate tossing a biased coin where the probability of getting heads is p. The current player is awarded alpha points for tails and alpha+beta for heads. The first player reaching n points wins. For a completely unfair coin…
Under investigation in this paper is the dynamics and probability of heads in the toss of a coin with symmetric inhomogeneous density. Such coins are assumed to have diagonal inertia matrix. The rotational motion of the coin is determined…
We consider a simple dice game, which leads to an intriguing study of multinomial walks, with surprising and seemingly paradoxical properties. The winning and losing probabilities of a general version of the game are investigated via…
We study the probability that a given candidate is an alpha-winner, i.e. a candidate preferred to each other candidate j by a fraction alpha_j of the voters. This extends the classical notion of Condorcet winner, which corresponds to the…
When a thick cylindrical coin is tossed in the air and lands without bouncing on an inelastic substrate, it ends up on its face or its side. We account for the rigid body dynamics of spin and precession and calculate the probability…
We study random graphs with latent geometric structure, where the probability of each edge depends on the underlying random positions corresponding to the two endpoints. We focus on the setting where this conditional probability is a…
We study the phenomenon of intransitivity in models of dice and voting. First, we follow a recent thread of research for $n$-sided dice with pairwise ordering induced by the probability, relative to $1/2$, that a throw from one die is…
Consider a coin tossing experiment which consists of tossing one of two coins at a time, according to a renewal process. The first coin is fair and the second has probability $1/2 + \theta$, $\theta \in [-1/2,1/2]$, $\theta$ unknown but…
Consider the following probability puzzle: A fair coin is flipped n times. For each HT in the resulting sequence, Bob gets a point, and for each HH Alice gets a point. Who is more likely to win? We provide a proof that Bob wins more often…
Binomial distributions capture the probabilities of `heads' outcomes when a (biased) coin is tossed multiple times. The coin may be identified with a distribution on the two-element set {0,1}, where the 1 outcome corresponds to `head'. One…
There are $n$ independent Bernoulli random variables with parameters $p_i$ that are observed sequentially. Two players, A and B, act in turns starting with player A. Each player has the possibility on his turn, when $I_k=1$, to choose…
Imagine that there are two bins to which balls are added sequentially, and each incoming ball joins a bin with probability proportional to the p-th power of the number of balls already there. A general result says that if p>1/2, there…
We provide an operational interpretation of the multivariate R\'enyi divergence in terms of economic-theoretic tasks based on betting, risk aversion, and multiple lotteries. We show that the multivariate R\'enyi divergence…
Winners-take-all situations introduce an incentive for agents to diversify their behavior, since doing so will result in splitting an eventual price with fewer people. At the same time, when the payoff of a process depends on a parameter…
We solve exactly a simple model of trend following strategy, and obtain the analytical shape of the profit per trade distribution. This distribution is non trivial and has an option like, asymmetric structure. The degree of asymmetry…
We consider a particular class of n-dimensional homogeneous diffusions all of which have an identity diffusion matrix and a drift function that is piecewise constant and scale invariant. Abstract stochastic calculus immediately gives us…
We review recent results obtained from simple individual-based models of biological competition in which birth and death rates of an organism depend on the presence of other competing organisms close to it. In addition the individuals…
We start with a set of n players. With some probability P(n,k), we kill n-k players; the other ones stay alive, and we repeat with them. What is the distribution of the number X_n of phases (or rounds) before getting only one player? We…
A celebrated analogy between prime factorizations of integers and cycle decompositions of permutations is explored here. Asymptotic formulas characterizing semismooth numbers (possessing at most several large factors) carry over to random…
The aim of this paper is to study the asymptotic behavior of strongly reinforced interacting urns with partial memory sharing. The reinforcement mechanism considered is as follows: draw at each step and for each urn a white or black ball…