Related papers: Why do we change whatever amount we found in the f…
In a voting problem with a finite set of alternatives to choose from, we study the manipulation of tops-only rules. Since all non-dictatorial (onto) voting rules are manipulable when there are more than two alternatives and all preferences…
Making decisions freely presupposes that there is some indeterminacy in the environment and in the decision making engine. The former is reflected on the behavioral changes due to communicating: few changes indicate rigid environments;…
We introduce a variant of Shepp's classical urn problem in which the optimal stopper does not know whether sampling from the urn is done with or without replacement. By considering the problem's continuous-time analog, we provide bounds on…
Null hypothesis significance testing remains popular despite decades of concern about misuse and misinterpretation. We believe that much of the problem is due to language: significance testing has little to do with other meanings of the…
The envelope theory is an easy-to-use approximation method to obtain eigensolutions for some quantum many-body systems, in particular in the domain of hadronic physics. Even if the solutions are reliable and an improvement procedure exists,…
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…
This paper explores how ambiguity affects communication. We consider a cheap talk model in which the receiver evaluates the sender's message with respect to its worst-case expected payoff generated by multiplier preferences. We characterize…
Is more information always better? Or are there some situations in which more information can make us worse off? Good (1967) argues that expected utility maximizers should always accept more information if the information is cost-free and…
Opportunities, such as access to education or family background, shape income inequality by influencing the chances of economic success. Unequal opportunities create uncertainty about whether success is merit- or luck-based. We examine how…
People often receive good news that makes them feel better about the world around them, or bad news that makes them feel worse about it. This paper studies how the valence of news affects belief updating, absent functional and ego-relevant…
Given a set of coins arranged in a line, we remove heads-up coins one at a time and flip any adjacent coins after each removal. The coin-removal problem is to determine for which arrangements of coins it is possible to remove all of the…
In this paper we study different concepts of independence for convex sets of probabilities. There will be two basic ideas for independence. The first is irrelevance. Two variables are independent when a change on the knowledge about one…
We present a new duality theory for non-convex variational problems, under possibly mixed Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. The dual problem reads nicely as a linear programming problem, and our main result states that there is no…
We analyze the problem of comparing unitary transformations. The task is to decide, with minimal resources and maximal reliability, whether two given unitary transformations are identical or different. It is possible to make such…
The motivation for extending secret sharing schemes to cases when either the set of players is infinite or the domain from which the secret and/or the shares are drawn is infinite or both, is similar to the case when switching to abstract…
The eigensolutions of many-body quantum systems are always difficult to compute. The envelope theory is a method to easily obtain approximate, but reliable, solutions in the case of identical particles. It is extended here to treat systems…
The Principle of Maximum Entropy is a rigorous technique for estimating an unknown distribution given partial information while simultaneously minimizing bias. However, an important requirement for applying the principle is that the…
In formal language theory, one of the most fundamental tools, known as pumping lemmas, is extremely useful for regular and context-free languages. However, there are natural properties for which the pumping lemmas are of little use. One of…
We study several consequences of the packing problem, a conjecture from combinatorial optimization, using algebraic invariants of square-free monomial ideals. While the packing problem is currently unresolved, we successfully settle the…
We study the problem of regret minimization for a single bidder in a sequence of first-price auctions where the bidder discovers the item's value only if the auction is won. Our main contribution is a complete characterization, up to…