Related papers: How to Lose with Least Probability
In a zero-sum stochastic game, at each stage, two adversary players take decisions and receive a stage payoff determined by them and by a controlled random variable representing the state of nature. The total payoff is the normalized…
Have you ever taken a disputed decision by tossing a coin and checking its landing side? This ancestral "heads or tails" practice is still widely used when facing undecided alternatives since it relies on the intuitive fairness of…
The Stochastic Abacus is employed to compute winning probabilities at each level of the game Pass the Buck on a complete binary tree with the starting vertex being the root of the tree. The derivation is also generalized to play on complete…
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…
We give operational meaning to wave-particle duality in terms of discrimination games. Duality arises as a constraint on the probability of winning these games. The games are played with the aid of an n-port interferometer, and involve 3…
In a competitive sport, every little thing matters. Yet, many sports leave some large levers out of the reach of the teams, and in the hands of fate. In cricket, world's second most popular sport by some measures, one such lever---the…
We propose a game-theoretic framework that incorporates both incomplete information and general ambiguity attitudes on factors external to all players. Our starting point is players' preferences on payoff-distribution vectors, essentially…
In this paper we introduce and study {\em all-pay bidding games}, a class of two player, zero-sum games on graphs. The game proceeds as follows. We place a token on some vertex in the graph and assign budgets to the two players. Each turn,…
A decision maker observes the evolving state of the world while constantly trying to predict the next state given the history of past states. The ability to benefit from such predictions depends not only on the ability to recognize patters…
Consider concurrent, infinite duration, two-player win/lose games played on graphs. If the winning condition satisfies some simple requirement, the existence of Player 1 winning (finite-memory) strategies is equivalent to the existence of…
This paper introduced a pursuit and evasion game to be played on a connected graph. One player moves invisibly around the graph, and the other player must guess his position. At each time step the second player guesses a vertex, winning if…
We introduce and study Maker/Breaker-type positional games on random graphs. Our main concern is to determine the threshold probability $p_{F}$ for the existence of Maker's strategy to claim a member of $F$ in the unbiased game played on…
This paper introduces a strategy in the two envelopes problem that utilizes the prior beliefs of two players about the amount of money that their envelopes can contain. This strategy gives them more information about the decision of…
Minority game is a model of heterogeneous players who think inductively. In this game, each player chooses one out of two alternatives every turn and those who end up in the minority side wins. It is instructive to extend the minority game…
We consider the permutation analogue of Penney's game for words. Two players, in order, each choose a permutation of length $k\ge3$; then a sequence of independent random values from a continuous distribution is generated, until the…
Usually a voting rule requires agents to give their preferences as linear orders. However, in some cases it is impractical for an agent to give a linear order over all the alternatives. It has been suggested to let agents submit partial…
Flip a coin repeatedly, and stop whenever you want. Your payoff is the proportion of heads, and you wish to maximize this payoff in expectation. This so-called Chow-Robbins game is amenable to computer analysis, but while simple-minded…
We study two-player reachability games on finite graphs. At each state the interaction between the players is concurrent and there is a stochastic Nature. Players also play stochastically. The literature tells us that 1) Player B, who wants…
In the sport of cricket, the side that wins the toss and has the first choice to bat or bowl can have an unfair or a critical advantage. The issue has been discussed by International Cricket Council committees, as well as several cricket…
We present a quantum protocol for the task of weak coin flipping. We find that, for one choice of parameters in the protocol, the maximum probability of a dishonest party winning the coin flip if the other party is honest is 1/sqrt(2). We…