Related papers: How Many Rounds Should You Expect in Urn Solitaire…
Consider a number, finite or not, of urns each with fixed capacity $r$ and balls randomly distributed among them. An overflow is the number of balls that are assigned to urns that already contain $r$ balls. When $r=1$, using analytic…
An urn contains balls of d colors. At each time, a ball is drawn and then replaced together with a random number of balls of the same color. Assuming that some colors are dominated by others, we prove central limit theorems. Some…
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…
We survey the design of elections that are resilient to attempted interference by third parties. For example, suppose votes have been cast in an election between two candidates, and then each vote is randomly changed with a small…
Given $n$ colored balls, we want to detect if more than $\lfloor n/2\rfloor$ of them have the same color, and if so find one ball with such majority color. We are only allowed to choose two balls and compare their colors, and the goal is to…
Consider n unit intervals, say [1,2], [3,4], ..., [2n-1,2n]. Identify their endpoints in pairs at random, with all (2n-1)!! = (2n-1) (2n-3) ... 3 1 pairings being equally likely. The result is a collection of cycles of various lengths, and…
The setting of the classic prophet inequality is as follows: a gambler is shown the probability distributions of $n$ independent, non-negative random variables with finite expectations. In their indexed order, a value is drawn from each…
Interacting urns with exponential reinforcement were introduced and studied in Launay (2011). As its parameter $\rho$ tends to $\iy$, this reinforcement mechanism converges to the "generalized" reinforcement, in which the probability of…
Consider an urn model where at each step one of $q$ colors is sampled according to some probability distribution and a ball of that color is placed in an urn. The distribution of assigning balls to urns may depend on the color of the ball.…
We study the voting problem with two alternatives where voters' preferences depend on a not-directly-observable state variable. While equilibria in the one-round voting mechanisms lead to a good decision, they are usually hard to compute…
We consider a variant of the randomly reinforced urn where more balls can be simultaneously drawn out and balls of different colors can be simultaneously added. More precisely, at each time-step, the conditional distribution of the number…
We consider the following one-player game called Dundee. We are given a deck consisting of s_i cards of Value i, where i=1,...,v, and an integer m\le s_1+...+s_v. There are m rounds. In each round, the player names a number between 1 and v…
Apportionment is the act of distributing the seats of a legislature among political parties (or states) in proportion to their vote shares (or populations). A famous impossibility by Balinski and Young (2001) shows that no apportionment…
An extended Polya urn Model with two colors, black and white, is studied with some SLLN and CLT on the proportion of white balls.
We consider a time-dependent version of a P\'olya urn containing black and white balls. At each time $n$ a ball is drawn from the urn at random and replaced in the urn along with $\sigma_n$ additional balls of the same colour. The…
We consider a two-color P\'{o}lya urn in the case when a fixed number $S$ of balls is added at each step. Assume it is a large urn that is, the second eigenvalue $m$ of the replacement matrix satisfies $1/2<m/S\leq1$. After $n$ drawings,…
We consider in this paper an urn and ball problem with replacement, where balls are with different colors and are drawn uniformly from a unique urn. The numbers of balls with a given color are i.i.d. random variables with a heavy tailed…
Consider a finite undirected graph and place an urn with balls of two colours at each vertex. At every discrete time step, for each urn, a fixed number of balls are drawn from that same urn with probability $p$, and from a randomly chosen…
Apportionment is the problem of distributing $h$ indivisible seats across states in proportion to the states' populations. In the context of the US House of Representatives, this problem has a rich history and is a prime example of…
The paper considers urn schemes in which several urns can be involved. Simplified formulas are proposed that allow direct calculation of probabilities without the use of elements combinatorics.