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Simple stochastic games are turn-based 2.5-player zero-sum graph games with a reachability objective. The problem is to compute the winning probability as well as the optimal strategies of both players. In this paper, we compare the three…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-07-21 Jan Kretinsky , Emanuel Ramneantu , Alexander Slivinskiy , Maximilian Weininger

An extensive literature in economics and social science addresses contests, in which players compete to outperform each other on some measurable criterion, often referred to as a player's score, or output. Players incur costs that are an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-08-01 Leslie Ann Goldberg , Paul W. Goldberg , Piotr Krysta , Carmine Ventre

We start with the well-known game below: Two players hold a sheet of paper to their forehead on which a positive integer is written. The numbers are consecutive and each player can only see the number of the other one. In each time step,…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2013-02-26 Felix Günther , Irina Mustata

We examine a two-person game we call Will-Testing in which the strategy space for both players is a real number. It has no equilibrium. When an infinitely large set of players plays this in all possible pairings, there is an equilibrium for…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-06-28 Leonid Gurvits , J. Stephen Judd

In the gift exchange game there are n players and n wrapped gifts. When a player's number is called, that person can either choose one of the remaining wrapped gifts, or can "steal" a gift from someone who has already unwrapped it, subject…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-02-06 Moa Apagodu , David Applegate , N. J. A. Sloane , Doron Zeilberger

We study the computational complexity of the problem of computing local min-max equilibria of games with a nonconvex-nonconcave utility function $f$. From the work of Daskalakis, Skoulakis, and Zampetakis [DSZ21], this problem was known to…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Martino Bernasconi , Matteo Castiglioni

"Guess Who?" is a popular two player game where players ask "Yes"/"No" questions to search for their opponent's secret identity from a pool of possible candidates. This is modeled as a simple stochastic game. Using this model, the optimal…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-11-24 Mihai Nica

Coalitional games are mathematical models suited to analyze scenarios where players can collaborate by forming coalitions in order to obtain higher worths than by acting in isolation. A fundamental problem for coalitional games is to single…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-07-19 Gianluigi Greco , Enrico Malizia , Luigi Palopoli , Francesco Scarcello

This is about algebras of complex $n\times n$ matrices. Do these algebras look similar for all large $n$? This paper is intended for general audience.

History and Overview · Mathematics 2025-11-12 Ilijas Farah

A Richman game is a combinatorial game in which, rather than alternating moves, the two players bid for the privilege of making the next move. We consider both the case where the players pay each other and the case where the players pay a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2009-09-25 Andrew J. Lazarus , Daniel E. Loeb , James G. Propp , Daniel Ullman

This paper aims to reduce the communication and computation costs of the Nash equilibrium seeking strategy for the $N$-coalition noncooperative games proposed in [1]. The objective is achieved in two manners: 1. An interference graph is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-05 Maojiao Ye , Guoqiang Hu , Frank L. Lewis , Lihua Xie

There is currently an intersection in the research of game theory and cryptography. Generally speaking, there are two aspects to this partnership. First there is the application of game theory to cryptography. Yet, the purpose of this paper…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2010-01-05 Thomas Kellam Meyer

Game theory is the study of tractable games which may be used to model more complex systems. Board games, video games and sports, however, are intractable by design, so "ludological" theories about these games as complex phenomena should be…

Applications · Statistics 2018-11-05 Daniel E. Gilbert , Martin T. Wells

Simple stochastic games are turn-based 2.5-player zero-sum graph games with a reachability objective. The problem is to compute the winning probability as well as the optimal strategies of both players. In this paper, we compare the three…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Jan Křetínský , Emanuel Ramneantu , Alexander Slivinskiy , Maximilian Weininger

We study computational problems arising from the iterated removal of weakly dominated actions in anonymous games. Our main result shows that it is NP-complete to decide whether an anonymous game with three actions can be solved via iterated…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-02-06 Felix Brandt , Felix Fischer , Markus Holzer

We consider a simple streaming game between two players Alice and Bob, which we call the mirror game. In this game, Alice and Bob take turns saying numbers belonging to the set $\{1, 2, \dots,2N\}$. A player loses if they repeat a number…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2017-10-10 Sumegha Garg , Jon Schneider

We consider Stackelberg pricing games, which are also known as bilevel pricing problems, or combinatorial price-setting problems. This family of problems consists of games between two players: the leader and the follower. There is a market…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Christoph Grüne , Dorothee Henke , Eva Rotenberg , Lasse Wulf

The Traveling Tournament Problem(TTP) is a combinatorial optimization problem where we have to give a scheduling algorithm which minimizes the total distance traveled by all the participating teams of a double round-robin tournament…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Diptendu Chatterjee , Bimal Kumar Roy

A knockout tournament is one of the most simple and popular forms of competition. Here, we are given a binary tournament tree where all leaves are labeled with seed position names. The players participating in the tournament are assigned to…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Klim Efremenko , Hendrik Molter , Meirav Zehavi

In his book "Mathematical Mind-Benders", Peter Winkler poses the following open problem, originally due to the first author: "[In the game Peer Pressure,] two players are dealt some number of cards, initially face up, each card carrying a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2010-01-08 Boris Alexeev , Jacob Tsimerman