Related papers: Some people have all the luck
How do large-scale participants in parimutuel wagering events affect the house and ordinary bettors? A standard narrative suggests that they may temporarily benefit the former at the expense of the latter. To approach this problem, we begin…
We study an optimal control problem arising from a generalization of rock-paper-scissors in which the number of strategies may be selected from any positive odd number greater than 1 and in which the payoff to the winner is controlled by a…
In frequently repeated matching scenarios, individuals may require diversification in their choices. Therefore, when faced with a set of potential outcomes, each individual may have an ideal lottery over outcomes that represents their…
We enable aProbLog---a probabilistic logical programming approach---to reason in presence of uncertain probabilities represented as Beta-distributed random variables. We achieve the same performance of state-of-the-art algorithms for highly…
In the paper it is proven that the two-players turn-based stochastic game "Risk or Safety" has a unique solution. Both players need to play the same strategy if they want to maximize their winning chances. An analytical method based on the…
We speculate on the distribution of primes in exponentially growing, linear recurrence sequences $(u_n)_{n\geq 0}$ in the integers. By tweaking a heuristic which is successfully used to predict the number of prime values of polynomials, we…
Stochastic dominance is a crucial tool for the analysis of choice under risk. It is typically analyzed as a property of two gambles that are taken in isolation. We study how additional independent sources of risk (e.g. uninsurable labor…
The prospects of Kahneman and Tversky, Mega Million and Powerball lotteries, St. Petersburg paradox, premature profits and growing losses criticized by Livermore are reviewed under an angle of view comparing mathematical expectations with…
It is shown that under reasonable assumptions a Drake-style equation can be obtained for the probability that our universe is the result of a deliberate simulation. Evaluating loose bounds for certain terms in the equation shows that the…
Statistical applications in sports have long centered on how to best separate signal (e.g. team talent) from random noise. However, most of this work has concentrated on a single sport, and the development of meaningful cross-sport…
Consumers often face products sold as lotteries rather than fixed outcomes. A prominent case is the loot box in video games, where players pay for randomized rewards. We investigate how presentation formats shape consumer beliefs and…
We consider a specialized form of risk management for betting opportunities with low payout frequency, presented in particular for exotic horse race wagering. An optimization problem is developed which limits losing streaks with high…
Consider the following probability puzzle: A fair coin is flipped n times. For each HT in the resulting sequence, Bob gets a point, and for each HH Alice gets a point. Who is more likely to win? We provide a proof that Bob wins more often…
Muchnik's paradox says that enumerable betting strategies are not always reducible to enumerable strategies whose bets are restricted to either even rounds or odd rounds. In other words, there are outcome sequences x where an effectively…
We study the following game. Three players start with initial capitals of $s_{1},s_{2},s_{3}$ dollars; in each round player $P_{m}$ is selected with probability $\frac{1}{3}$; then \emph{he} selects player $P_{n}$ and they play a game in…
We consider 2-player zero-sum stochastic games where each player controls his own state variable living in a compact metric space. The terminology comes from gambling problems where the state of a player represents its wealth in a casino.…
We consider how to make probability forecasts of binary labels. Our main mathematical result is that for any continuous gambling strategy used for detecting disagreement between the forecasts and the actual labels, there exists a…
Large language models are increasingly used to evaluate other models, yet these judgments typically lack any representation of confidence. This pilot study tests whether framing an evaluation task as a betting game (a fictional prediction…
In this work the properties of minority games containing agents which try to winning all the time are studied by means of computational simulations. We have considered several ways of introducing above the rules clever players using…
We consider a novel stochastic multi-armed bandit setting, where playing an arm makes it unavailable for a fixed number of time slots thereafter. This models situations where reusing an arm too often is undesirable (e.g. making the same…