Related papers: The Unlucky Door
The multi-armed bandit is a concise model for the problem of iterated decision-making under uncertainty. In each round, a gambler must pull one of $K$ arms of a slot machine, without any foreknowledge of their payouts, except that they are…
We consider two-player iterated survival games in which players may switch from a more cooperative behavior to a less cooperative one at some step of the game. Payoffs are survival probabilities and lone individuals have to finish the game…
We consider a game in which two separate laboratories collaborate to prepare a quantum system and are then asked to guess the outcome of a measurement performed by a third party in a random basis on that system. Intuitively, by the…
Consider a 4-player version of Matching Pennies where a team of three players competes against the Devil. Each player simultaneously says "Heads" or "Tails". The team wins if all four choices match; otherwise the Devil wins. If all team…
The Pandora's Box problem models the search for the best alternative when evaluation is costly. In the simplest variant, a decision maker is presented with $n$ boxes, each associated with a cost of inspection and a hidden random reward. The…
We study the optimal allocation of prizes in rank-order tournaments with loss averse agents. Prize sharing becomes increasingly optimal with loss aversion because more equitable prizes reduce the marginal psychological cost of anticipated…
In this paper we solve the three-player-game question. A three-player-game consists of a series of rounds. There are altogether three players. Two players participate in each round, at the end of the round the loser quits and the third…
We discuss games involving a counterfeit coin. Given one counterfeit coin among a number of otherwise identical coins, two players with full knowledge of the fake coin take turns weighing coins on a two-pan scale, under the condition that…
The transitivity of preferences is one of the basic assumptions used in the theory of games and decisions. It is often equated with rationality of choice and is considered useful in building rankings. Intransitive preferences are considered…
Counter reachability games are played by two players on a graph with labelled edges. Each move consists in picking an edge from the current location and adding its label to a counter vector. The objective is to reach a given counter value…
In a single winner election with several candidates and ranked choice or rating scale ballots, a Condorcet winner is one who wins all their two way races by majority rule or MR. A voting system has Condorcet consistency or CC if it names…
Solving a reinforcement learning problem typically involves correctly prespecifying the reward signal from which the algorithm learns. Here, we approach the problem of reward signal design by using an evolutionary approach to perform a…
The 1936 Mills Futurity slot machine had the feature that, if a player loses 10 times in a row, the 10 lost coins are returned. Ethier and Lee (2010) studied a generalized version of this machine, with 10 replaced by deterministic parameter…
I think we can agree that dealing with uncertainty is not easy. Probability is the main tool for dealing with uncertainty, and we know there are many probability-related puzzles and paradoxes. Here I describe a rather idiosyncratic…
Consider n cards that are labeled 1 through n with n an even integer. The cards are put face down and their ordering starts with card labeled 1 on top through card labeled n at the bottom. The cards are top to random shuffled m times and…
We consider the urn setting with two different objects, ``good'' and ``bad'', and analyze the number of draws without replacement until a good object is picked. Although the expected number of draws for this setting is a standard textbook…
We prove computational intractability of variants of checkers: (1) deciding whether there is a move that forces the other player to win in one move is NP-complete; (2) checkers where players must always be able to jump on their turn is…
Chances of a gambler are always lower than chances of a casino in the case of an ideal, mathematically perfect roulette, if the capital of the gambler is limited and the minimum and maximum allowed bets are limited by the casino. However, a…
We consider two-player combinatorial games in which the graph of positions is random and perhaps infinite, focusing on directed Galton-Watson trees. As the offspring distribution is varied, a game can undergo a phase transition, in which…
In this article, I will present a paradox whose purpose is to draw your attention to an important topic in finance, concerning the non-independence of the financial returns (non-ergodic hypothesis). In this paradox, we have two people…