Related papers: Some people have all the luck
In this article, we look at a hat-guessing game, in which each player must guess the color of their own hat while only seeing the hats of the other players. We focus on the case of two hat colors and a countably infinite number of players.…
In this paper, we propose a model which simulates odds distributions of pari-mutuel betting system under two hypotheses on the behavior of bettors: 1. The amount of bets increases very rapidly as the deadline for betting comes near. 2. Each…
Balanced knockout tournaments are ubiquitous in sports competitions and are also used in decision-making and elections. The traditional computational question, that asks to compute a draw (optimal draw) that maximizes the winning…
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…
The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk…
Mobile phone-based sports betting has exploded in popularity in many African countries. Commentators worry that low-ability gamblers will not learn from experience, and may rely on debt to gamble. Using data on financial transactions for…
In economy, markets are denoted as efficient when it is impossible to systematically generate profits which outperform the average. In the past years, the concept has been tested in other domains such as the growing sports betting market.…
Two players alternate tossing a biased coin where the probability of getting heads is p. The current player is awarded alpha points for tails and alpha+beta for heads. The first player reaching n points wins. For a completely unfair coin…
Suppose that the outcomes of a roulette table are not entirely random, in the sense that there exists a successful betting strategy. Is there a successful `separable' strategy, in the sense that it does not use the winnings from betting on…
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…
We present a couple of adaptive learning models of poker-like games, by means of which we show how bluffing strategies emerge very naturally, and can also be rational and evolutively stable. Despite their very simple learning algorithms,…
We derive an explicit formula for the probability of ruin of a gambler playing against an infinitely-rich adversary, when the games have payoff given by a general integer-valued probability distribution.
This work explains how to utilize earlier results by P. Diaconis, K. Houston-Edwards and the second author to estimate probabilities related to the 4-player gambler ruin problem. For instance, we show that the probability that a very…
Lotteries are a prevalent form of gambling between a seller and buyers. Designing a lottery requires a model of how buyers make decisions when confronted with uncertain outcomes. Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) is a descriptive model that…
Various measures can be used to estimate bias or unfairness in a predictor. Previous work has already established that some of these measures are incompatible with each other. Here we show that, when groups differ in prevalence of the…
One of the most celebrated results in mechanism design is Myerson's characterization of the revenue optimal auction for selling a single item. However, this result relies heavily on the assumption that buyers are indifferent to risk. In…
Resource allocation problems across multiple contests are ubiquitous in adversarial settings, from military operations to market competition. While Colonel Blotto and General Lotto games have provided valuable theoretical foundations for…
We study the classic divide-and-choose method for equitably allocating divisible goods between two players who are rational, self-interested Bayesian agents. The players have additive values for the goods. The prior distributions on those…
Infinite games where several players seek to coordinate under imperfect information are known to be intractable, unless the information flow is severely restricted. Examples of undecidable cases typically feature a situation where players…
Humans exhibit irrational decision-making patterns in response to environmental triggers, such as experiencing an economic loss or gain. In this paper we investigate whether algorithms exhibit the same behavior by examining the observed…