Related papers: The Coupon Collector's Brother

Consider the following game: You are given two indistinguishable envelopes, each containing money. One contains twice as much as the other. You may pick one envelope and keep the money it contains. Having chosen an envelope, you are given…

Consensus halving refers to the problem of dividing a resource into two parts so that every agent values both parts equally. Prior work has shown that when the resource is represented by an interval, a consensus halving with at most $n$…

Let a deck of n cards be shuffled by successively exchanging the cards in positions 1, 2, ..., n with cards in randomly chosen positions. We show that for n equal to 18 or greater, the identity permutation is the most likely. We prove a…

One tuple of probability vectors is more informative than another tuple when there exists a single stochastic matrix transforming the probability vectors of the first tuple into the probability vectors of the other. This is called matrix…

Consider a bin containing $n$ balls colored with two colors. In a $k$-query, $k$ balls are selected by a questioner and the oracle's reply is related (depending on the computation model being considered) to the distribution of colors of the…

We study variants of the \emph{Frobenius coin-exchange problem}: given $n$ positive relatively prime parameters, what is the largest integer that cannot be represented as a nonnegative integral linear combination of the given integers? This…

The Pandora's Box problem models the search for the best alternative when evaluation is costly. In the simplest variant, a decision maker is presented with $n$ boxes, each associated with a cost of inspection and a hidden random reward. The…

Using derandomization, we provide an upper bound on the compression size of solutions to the graph coloring problem. In general, if solutions to a combinatorial problem exist with high probability and the probability is simple, then there…

We present a general framework for proving polynomial sample complexity bounds for the problem of learning from samples the best auction in a class of "simple" auctions. Our framework captures all of the most prominent examples of "simple"…

The Tsetlin library is a well-studied Markov chain on the symmetric group $S_n$. It has stationary distribution $\pi(\sigma)$ the Luce model, a nonuniform distribution on $S_n$, which appears in psychology, horse race betting, and…

We discuss voting scenarios in which the set of voters (agents) and the set of alternatives are the same; that is, voters select a single representative from among themselves. Such a scenario happens, for instance, when a committee selects…

We consider a bilevel continuous knapsack problem where the leader controls the capacity of the knapsack, while the follower chooses a feasible packing maximizing his own profit. The leader's aim is to optimize a linear objective function…

Let $S$ be a finite set of positive integers with largest element $m$. Let us randomly select a composition $a$ of the integer $n$ with parts in $S$, and let $m(a)$ be the multiplicity of $m$ as a part of $a$. Let $0\leq r<q$ be integers,…

We treat a version of the multiple-choice secretary problem called the multiple-choice duration problem, in which the objective is to maximize the time of possession of relatively best objects. It is shown that, for the $m$--choice duration…

We derive lower and upper bounds on possible growth rates of certain sets of positive integers $A_k=\{1= a_1 < a_2 < ... < a_{k}\}$ such that all integers $n\in \{0, 1, 2, ..., ka_{k}\}$ can be represented as a sum of no more than $k$…

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…

We consider the occupancy problem where balls are thrown independently at infinitely many boxes with fixed positive frequencies. It is well known that the random number of boxes occupied by the first n balls is asymptotically normal if its…

A Poisson Binomial distribution over $n$ variables is the distribution of the sum of $n$ independent Bernoullis. We provide a sample near-optimal algorithm for testing whether a distribution $P$ supported on $\{0,...,n\}$ to which we have…

This work considers a binomial noise channel. The paper can be roughly divided into two parts. The first part is concerned with the properties of the capacity-achieving distribution. In particular, for the binomial channel, it is not known…

We consider the following cake cutting game: Alice chooses a set P of n points in the square (cake) [0,1]^2, where (0,0) is in P; Bob cuts out n axis-parallel rectangles with disjoint interiors, each of them having a point of P as the lower…