Related papers: Some people have all the luck
From the gambling logs of an online lottery game we extract the probability distribution of various quantities (e.g., bet value, total pool size, waiting time between successive gambles) as well as related correlation coefficients. We view…
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,…
It is well known that in games with imperfect information, such as poker, bluffing with some probability can be a component of the optimal strategy. However, as far as we know, nobody has ever exhibited a Scrabble position in which the…
The multi-armed bandit is a concise model for the problem of iterated decision-making under uncertainty. In each round, a gambler must pull one of $K$ arms of a slot machine, without any foreknowledge of their payouts, except that they are…
Behavioral experiments on the Ultimatum Game have shown that we human beings have remarkable preference in fair play, contradicting the predictions by the game theory. Most of the existing models seeking for explanations, however, strictly…
The lottery is a very lucrative industry. Popular fascination often focuses on the largest prizes. However, less attention has been paid to detecting unusual lottery buying behaviors at lower stakes. Our paper introduces a new model to…
We study a combinatorial game derived from a problem in the German National Mathematics Competition. In this game, two players take turns removing numbers from a finite set of natural numbers, aiming to satisfy a certain divisibility…
Sports betting's recent federal legalisation in the USA coincides with the golden age of machine learning. If bettors can leverage data to reliably predict the probability of an outcome, they can recognise when the bookmaker's odds are in…
We consider the psychological effect of preference reversal and show that it finds a natural explanation in the frame of quantum decision theory. When people choose between lotteries with non-negative payoffs, they prefer a more certain…
Across science and policy, decision-makers often need to draw conclusions about the best candidate among competing alternatives. For instance, researchers may seek to infer the effectiveness of the most successful treatment or determine…
The allocation of resources plays an important role in the completion of system objectives and tasks, especially in the presence of strategic adversaries. Optimal allocation strategies are becoming increasingly more complex, given that…
We consider the problem of predicting winners in elections, for the case where we are given complete knowledge about all possible candidates, all possible voters (together with their preferences), but where it is uncertain either which…
The old adage says that it is better to be lucky than to be good, but when it comes to winning NCAA tournament pools, do you need to be both? This paper attempts to answer this question using data from the 2014 men's basketball tournament…
That there exist two losing games that can be combined, either by random mixture or by nonrandom alternation, to form a winning game is known as Parrondo's paradox. We establish a strong law of large numbers and a central limit theorem for…
This paper studies the income fluctuation problem with capital income risk (i.e., dispersion in the rate of return to wealth). Wealth returns and labor earnings are allowed to be serially correlated and mutually dependent. Rewards can be…
We study an ensemble of individuals playing the two games of the so-called Parrondo paradox. In our study, players are allowed to choose the game to be played by the whole ensemble in each turn. The choice cannot conform to the preferences…
In forecasting competitions, the traditional mechanism scores the predictions of each contestant against the outcome of each event, and the contestant with the highest total score wins. While it is well-known that this traditional mechanism…
In a guessing game, players guess the value of a random real number selected using some probability density function. The winner may be determined in various ways; for example, a winner can be a player whose guess is closest in magnitude to…
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…
In many prediction problems, it is not uncommon that the number of variables used to construct a forecast is of the same order of magnitude as the sample size, if not larger. We then face the problem of constructing a prediction in the…