Related papers: Resolving the two envelope paradox

Toral (2002) considered an ensemble of N\geq2 players. In game B a player is randomly selected to play Parrondo's original capital-dependent game. In game A' two players are randomly selected without replacement, and the first transfers one…

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…

Two players alternate tossing a biased coin where the probability of getting heads is p. The current player is awarded alpha points for tails and alpha+beta for heads. The first player reaching n points wins. For a completely unfair coin…

We study an evolutionary game of chance in which the probabilities for different outcomes (e.g., heads or tails) depend on the amount wagered on those outcomes. The game is perhaps the simplest possible probabilistic game in which…

In this paper, we study a game with positive or plus infinite expectation and determine the optimal proportion of investment for maximizing the limit expectation of growth rate per attempt. With this objective, we introduce a new pricing…

Parrondo's paradox occurs in sequences of games in which a winning expectation value of a payoff may be obtained by playing two games in a random order, even though each game in the sequence may be lost when played individually.Several…

The rational solution of the Monty Hall problem unsettles many people. Most people, including the authors, think it feels wrong to switch the initial choice of one of the three doors, despite having fully accepted the mathematical proof for…

We consider a card guessing game with complete feedback. An ordered deck of $n$ cards labeled $1$ up to $n$ is shelf-shuffled exactly one time. One after the other a single card is drawn from the shuffled deck. The guesser makes has guess…

A fair coin is flipped $n$ times, and two finite sequences of heads and tails (words) $A$ and $B$ of the same length are given. Each time the word $A$ appears in the sequence of coin flips, Alice gets a point, and each time the word $B$…

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…

We explore whether ambiguous communication can be beneficial to the sender in a persuasion problem, when the receiver (and possibly the sender) is ambiguity averse. Our analysis highlights the necessity of using a collection of experiments…

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…

Consider the following method of card shuffling. Start with a deck of $N$ cards numbered 1 through N. Fix a parameter $p$ between 0 and 1. In this model a ``shuffle'' consists of uniformly selecting a pair of adjacent cards and then…

We present an analysis of a coin-tossing problem posed by Daniel Litt which has generated some popular interest. We demonstrate a recursive identity which leads to relatively simple formulas for the excess number of wins for one player over…

Parrondo's paradox occurs in sequences of games in which a winning expectation may be obtained by playing the games in a random order, even though each game in the sequence may be lost when played individually. Several variations of…

This paper provides sufficient conditions for the existence of solutions for two-person zero-sum games with inf/sup-compact payoff functions and with possibly noncompact decision sets for both players. Payoff functions may be unbounded, and…

A simple classical probabilistic system (a simple card game) classically exemplifies Aharonov and Vaidman's "Three-Box 'paradox'" [J. Phys. A 24, 2315 (1991)], implying that the Three-Box example is neither quantal nor a paradox and leaving…

This paper considers a two-player game where each player chooses a resource from a finite collection of options. Each resource brings a random reward. Both players have statistical information regarding the rewards of each resource.…

In a prediction tournament, contestants "forecast" by asserting a numerical probability for each of (say) 100 future real-world events. The scoring system is designed so that (regardless of the unknown true probabilities) more accurate…

We study a random game in which two players in turn play a fixed number of moves. For each move, there are two possible choices. To each possible outcome of the game we assign a winner in an i.i.d. fashion with a fixed parameter p. In the…