Related papers: When to Quit Gambling, if You Must!
Lotteries are a prevalent form of gambling between a seller and buyers. Designing a lottery requires a model of how buyers make decisions when confronted with uncertain outcomes. Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) is a descriptive model that…
The multi-armed bandit is a concise model for the problem of iterated decision-making under uncertainty. In each round, a gambler must pull one of $K$ arms of a slot machine, without any foreknowledge of their payouts, except that they are…
The gambler's ruin problem for correlated random walks (CRW), both with and without delays, is addressed using the Optional Stopping Theorem for martingales. We derive closed-form expressions for the ruin probabilities and the expected game…
In the multiarmed bandit problem a gambler chooses an arm of a slot machine to pull considering a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. We study the stochastic bandit problem where each arm has a reward distribution supported in a…
Flip a coin repeatedly, and stop whenever you want. Your payoff is the proportion of heads, and you wish to maximize this payoff in expectation. This so-called Chow-Robbins game is amenable to computer analysis, but while simple-minded…
We introduce a general framework for continuous-time betting markets, in which a bookmaker can dynamically control the prices of bets on outcomes of random events. In turn, the prices set by the bookmaker affect the rate or intensity of…
This paper examines the integration of computational complexity into game theoretic models. The example focused on is the Prisoner's Dilemma, repeated for a finite length of time. We show that a minimal bound on the players' computational…
Gambits are central to human decision-making. Our goal is to provide a theory of Gambits. A Gambit is a combination of psychological and technical factors designed to disrupt predictable play. Chess provides an environment to study gambits…
We study the asymptotic behavior of the ratio of total return (or total profit) to total amount bet in a casino game. While the limit is well understood when the sequence of wagers is independent and identically distributed, here we…
Recent work has considered natural variations of the multi-armed bandit problem, where the reward distribution of each arm is a special function of the time passed since its last pulling. In this direction, a simple (yet widely applicable)…
We introduce a betting game, where the gambler aims to guess the last success epoch from past observed data. The player may bet on the event that no further successes occur, or choose a `trap' which is any span of future times. In the…
In this article we study an optimal stopping/optimal control problem which models the decision facing a risk-averse agent over when to sell an asset. The market is incomplete so that the asset exposure cannot be hedged. In addition to the…
The beautiful theory of statistical gambling, started by Dubins and Savage (for subfair games) and continued by Kelly and Breiman (for superfair games) has mostly been studied under the unrealistic assumption that we live in a continuous…
In the compulsive gambler process there is a finite set of agents who meet pairwise at random times ($i$ and $j$ meet at times of a rate-$\nu_{ij}$ Poisson process) and, upon meeting, play an instantaneous fair game in which one wins the…
Computer modeling of human decision making is of large importance for, e.g., sustainable transport, urban development, and online recommendation systems. In this paper we present a model for predicting the behavior of an individual during a…
We consider a sequential decision-making problem where an agent can take one action at a time and each action has a stochastic temporal extent, i.e., a new action cannot be taken until the previous one is finished. Upon completion, the…
Chances of a gambler are always lower than chances of a casino in the case of an ideal, mathematically perfect roulette, if the capital of the gambler is limited and the minimum and maximum allowed bets are limited by the casino. However, a…
Individuals are often faced with temptations that can lead them astray from long-term goals. We're interested in developing interventions that steer individuals toward making good initial decisions and then maintaining those decisions over…
For optimal stopping problems with time-inconsistent preference, we measure the inherent level of time-inconsistency by taking the time needed to turn the naive strategies into the sophisticated ones. In particular, when in a repeated…
Betting games provide a natural setting to capture how information yields strategic advantage. The Kelly criterion for betting, long a cornerstone of portfolio theory and information theory, admits an interpretation in the limit of…