Related papers: Dreidel Fairness Study
We present a variation of the broken stick problem in which $n$ stick lengths are sampled uniformly at random. We prove that the probability that no three sticks can form a triangle is the reciprocal of the product of the first $n$…
The paper considers fair allocation of resources that are already allocated in an unfair way. This setting requires a careful balance between the fairness considerations and the rights of the present owners. The paper presents re-division…
In many schools throughout the United States, it is customary to hold a yearly "Secret Santa" event. With the approach of Christmas, all the students place their names in a hat; each student, in turn, draws a name out of the hat, thus…
The Swiss-system is an increasingly popular competition format as it provides a favourable trade-off between the number of matches and ranking accuracy. However, there is no empirical study on the potential unfairness of Swiss-system chess…
This paper looks into the gain or loss from rolling a fair die multiple times and choosing the highest or lowest number as the outcome over rolling the die just once. Specifically, this paper gives a general formula for the expected value…
We study triples of labeled dice in which the relation "is a better die than" is non-transitive. Focusing on such triples with an additional symmetry we call "balance," we prove that such triples of $n$-sided dice exist for all $n \geq 3$.…
Cake cutting is a classic fair division problem, with the cake serving as a metaphor for a heterogeneous divisible resource. Recently, it was shown that for any number of players with arbitrary preferences over a cake, it is possible to…
Consider a coin tossing experiment which consists of tossing one of two coins at a time, according to a renewal process. The first coin is fair and the second has probability $1/2 + \theta$, $\theta \in [-1/2,1/2]$, $\theta$ unknown but…
Nontransitive dice are dice beating one another in a cyclic way: die A wins die B, B wins C, and C wins A (like in a rock-paper-scissors game). In this article, it has been shown that a structure of mutual wins of 3 nontransitive dice (with…
This paper studies grading algorithms for randomized exams. In a randomized exam, each student is asked a small number of random questions from a large question bank. The predominant grading rule is simple averaging, i.e., calculating…
A gambler walks into a hypothetical fair casino with a very real dollar bill, but by the time he leaves he's exchanged the dollar for a random amount of money. What is lost in the process? It may be that the gambler walks out at the end of…
We consider the setting of repeated fair division between two players, denoted Alice and Bob, with private valuations over a cake. In each round, a new cake arrives, which is identical to the ones in previous rounds. Alice cuts the cake at…
We indulge in what mathematicians call frivolous activities. In Arithmetic Billiards, a ball is bouncing around in a rectangle. In Parity Checkers we place checkers on a checkerboard under certain parity constraints. Both activities turn…
This article, based on a talk, treats some elementary, but not completely simple examples from probability. They concern multiple birthday coincidences, throwing dice, the combinatorics of the German card game "Doppelkopf", and the…
We study a fair division problem with indivisible items, namely the computation of maximin share allocations. Given a set of $n$ players, the maximin share of a single player is the best she can guarantee to herself, if she would partition…
In the game of Matching Pennies, Alice and Bob each hold a penny, and at every tick of the clock they simultaneously display the head or the tail sides of their coins. If they both display the same side, then Alice wins Bob's penny; if they…
Fair division with unequal shares is an intensively studied recourse allocation problem. For $ i\in [n] $, let $ \mu_i $ be an atomless probability measure on the measurable space $(C,\mathcal{S}) $ and let $ t_i $ be positive numbers…
The prediction of the final state probabilities of a general cuboid randomly thrown onto a surface is a problem that naturally arises in the minds of men and women familiar with regular cubic dice and the basic concepts of probability.…
We study the phenomenon of intransitivity in models of dice and voting. First, we follow a recent thread of research for $n$-sided dice with pairwise ordering induced by the probability, relative to $1/2$, that a throw from one die is…
In this work we present a detailed analysis using the Markov chain theory of some versions of the truel game in which three players try to eliminate each other in a series of one-to-one competitions, using the rules of the game. Besides…