Related papers: Majority and Plurality Problems

Majorisation, also called rearrangement inequalities, yields a type of stochastic ordering in which two or more distributions can be compared. In this paper we argue that majorisation is a good candidate as a theory for uncertainty. We…

In this paper we deal with the problem of finding the smallest and the largest elements of a totally ordered set of size $n$ using pairwise comparisons if $k$ of the comparisons might be erroneous where $k$ is a fixed constant. We prove…

We take a unified approach to central limit theorems for a class of irreducible urn models with constant replacement matrix. Depending on the eigenvalue, we consider appropriate linear combinations of the number of balls of different…

When are all positions of a game numbers? We show that two properties are necessary and sufficient. These properties are consequences of that, in a number, it is not an advantage to be the first player. One of these properties implies the…

Comparing the top $k$ elements between two or more ranked results is a common task in many contexts and settings. A few measures have been proposed to compare top $k$ lists with attractive mathematical properties, but they face a number of…

We study an urn process containing red and blue balls and two different strategies to reinforce the urn. Namely, a generalized P\'olya-type strategy versus an i.i.d. one. At each step, one of the two reinforcement strategies is chosen by…

Population protocols are a model of distributed computing where $n$ agents, each a simple finite-state machine, interact in pairs to solve a common task against a (adversarial) interaction scheduler. This model was intensively studied in…

League competition is investigated using random processes and scaling techniques. In our model, a weak team can upset a strong team with a fixed probability. Teams play an equal number of head-to-head matches and the team with the largest…

Models in which the number of goals scored by a team in a soccer match follow a Poisson distribution, or a closely related one, have been widely discussed. We here consider a soccer match as an experiment to assess which of two teams is…

We generalize overpartitions to (k,j)-colored partitions: k-colored partitions in which each part size may have at most j colors. We find numerous congruences and other symmetries. We use a wide array of tools to prove our theorems:…

Members of a shareholder meeting or legislative committee have greater or smaller voting power than meets the eye if the nucleolus of the induced majority game differs from the voting weight distribution. We establish a new sufficient…

We use the Minority Game as a testing frame for the problem of the emergence of diversity in socio-economic systems. For the MG with heterogeneous impacts, we show that the direct generalization of the usual agents' profit does not fit some…

We consider some coloring issues related to the famous Erd\H {o}s Discrepancy Problem. A set of the form $A_{s,k}=\{s,2s,\dots,ks\}$, with $s,k\in \mathbb{N}$, is called a \emph{homogeneous arithmetic progression}. We prove that for every…

Hedonic diversity games are a variant of the classical Hedonic games designed to better model a variety of questions concerning diversity and fairness. Previous works mainly targeted the case with two diversity classes (represented as…

For the plain Polya urn with two colors, black and white, we prove a functional central limit theorem for the number of white balls assuming that the initial number of black balls is large. Depending on the initial number of white balls,…

The Illumination Problem may be phrased as the problem of covering a convex body in Euclidean $n$-space by a minimum number of translates of its interior. By a probabilistic argument, we show that, arbitrarily close to the Euclidean ball,…

The locker puzzle is a game played by multiple players against a referee. It has been previously shown that the best strategy that exists cannot succeed with probability greater than 1-ln2 \approx 0.31, no matter how many players are…

The paper considers the problem of finding the number of dominant voters in two-level voting procedures. At the first stage, voting is conducted among local groups of voters, and at the second stage, the results are aggregated to form a…

We consider the problem of minimizing the size of a family of sets G such that every subset of 1,...,n can be written as a disjoint union of at most k members of G, where k and n are given numbers. This problem originates in a real-world…

This article studies the number of ways of selecting $k$ objects arranged in $p$ circles of sizes $n_1,\ldots,n_p$ such that no two selected ones have less than $s$ objects between them. If $n_i\geq sk+1$ for all $1\leq i \leq p$, this…