Related papers: How to Gamble Against All Odds
Betting games provide a natural setting to capture how information yields strategic advantage. The Kelly criterion for betting, long a cornerstone of portfolio theory and information theory, admits an interpretation in the limit of…
As predictive models are deployed into the real world, they must increasingly contend with strategic behavior. A growing body of work on strategic classification treats this problem as a Stackelberg game: the decision-maker "leads" in the…
Accurately predicting the outcome of sporting events has been a goal for many groups who seek to maximize profit. What makes this challenging is that the outcome of an event can be influenced by many factors that dynamically change across…
We study variants of a stochastic game inspired by backgammon where players may propose to double the stake, with the game state dictated by a one-dimensional random walk. Our variants allow for different numbers of proposals and different…
Consider a gambler who observes a sequence of independent, non-negative random numbers and is allowed to stop the sequence at any time, claiming a reward equal to the most recent observation. The famous prophet inequality of Krengel,…
In the prophet inequality problem, a gambler faces a sequence of items arriving online with values drawn independently from known distributions. On seeing an item, the gambler must choose whether to accept its value as her reward and quit…
Financial markets investors are involved in many games -- they must interact with other agents to achieve their goals. Among them are those directly connected with their activity on markets but one cannot neglect other aspects that…
This paper is concerned with asymptotic behaviour of a repeated game of "odds and evens", with strategies of both players represented by finite automata. It is proved that, for every $n$, there is an automaton with $2^n \cdot…
We introduce a way to compare actions in decision problems. One action is safer than another if the set of beliefs at which the decision-maker prefers the safer action expands as the decision-maker becomes more risk averse. We provide a…
It is known that a player in a noncooperative game can benefit by publicly restricting his possible moves before play begins. We show that, more generally, a player may benefit by publicly committing to pay an external party an amount that…
Gameplay under various forms of uncertainty has been widely studied. Feldman et al. (2010) studied a particularly low-information setting in which one observes the opponent's actions but no payoffs, not even one's own, and introduced an…
We consider a game with two players, consisting of a number of rounds, where the first player to win $n$ rounds becomes the overall winner. Who wins each individual round is governed by a certain urn having two types of balls (type 1 and…
We revisit the game in which each of several players chooses a pattern and then a coin is flipped repeatedly until one of these patterns is generated. In particular, we demonstrate how to compute the probability of any one player winning…
When facing a heavily-favored opponent, an underdog must be willing to assume greater-than-average risk. In statistical language, one would say that an underdog must be willing to adopt a strategy whose outcome has a larger-than-average…
Using methods from the statistical mechanics of disordered systems we analyze the properties of bimatrix games with random payoffs in the limit where the number of pure strategies of each player tends to infinity. We analytically calculate…
The beautiful theory of statistical gambling, started by Dubins and Savage (for subfair games) and continued by Kelly and Breiman (for superfair games) has mostly been studied under the unrealistic assumption that we live in a continuous…
We introduce the sequence-set betting game, a generalization of An. A. Muchnik's non-monotonic betting game. Instead of successively partitioning the infinite binary strings by their value of a bit at a chosen position, as in the…
Gambles are random variables that model possible changes in monetary wealth. Classic decision theory transforms money into utility through a utility function and defines the value of a gamble as the expectation value of utility changes.…
Recently, Press and Dyson have proposed a new class of probabilistic and conditional strategies for the two-player iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, so-called zero-determinant strategies. A player adopting zero-determinant strategies is able to…
In an all-pay auction, only one bidder wins but all bidders must pay the auctioneer. All-pay bidding games arise from attaching a similar bidding structure to traditional combinatorial games to determine which player moves next. In contrast…