Related papers: BONUS! Maximizing Surprise
This paper explores multi-entry strategies for betting pools related to single-elimination tournaments. In such betting pools, participants select winners of games, and their respective score is a weighted sum of the number of correct…
We study the optimal allocation of prizes in rank-order tournaments with loss averse agents. Prize sharing becomes increasingly optimal with loss aversion because more equitable prizes reduce the marginal psychological cost of anticipated…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
A valuation for a player in a game in extensive form is an assignment of numeric values to the players moves. The valuation reflects the desirability moves. We assume a myopic player, who chooses a move with the highest valuation.…
All proper scoring rules incentivize an expert to predict \emph{accurately} (report their true estimate), but not all proper scoring rules equally incentivize \emph{precision}. Rather than treating the expert's belief as exogenously given,…
In this work, we proposed a new $N$-person game in which the players can bet on two options, for example represented by two boxers. Some of the players have privileged information about the boxers and part of them can provide this…
Boxing has a long-standing problem with biased judging, impacting both professional and Olympic bouts. "Robberies", where boxers are widely seen as being denied rightful victories, threaten to drive fans and athletes away from the sport. To…
A two-player one-round binary game consists of two cooperative players who each replies by one bit to a message that he receives privately; they win the game if both questions and answers satisfy some predetermined property. A game is…
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…
Winners-take-all situations introduce an incentive for agents to diversify their behavior, since doing so will result in splitting an eventual price with fewer people. At the same time, when the payoff of a process depends on a parameter…
Consider a gambling game in which we are allowed to repeatedly bet a portion of our bankroll at favorable odds. We investigate the question of how to minimize the expected number of rounds needed to increase our bankroll to a given target…
"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…
There seems to be an upper limit to predicting the outcome of matches in (semi-)professional sports. Recent work has proposed that this is due to chance and attempts have been made to simulate the distribution of win percentages to identify…
We consider infinite-state turn-based stochastic games of two players, Box and Diamond, who aim at maximizing and minimizing the expected total reward accumulated along a run, respectively. Since the total accumulated reward is unbounded,…
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…
Imagine that there are two bins to which balls are added sequentially, and each incoming ball joins a bin with probability proportional to the p-th power of the number of balls already there. A general result says that if p>1/2, there…
Information flow measures, over the duration of a game, the audience's belief of who will win, and thus can reflect the amount of surprise in a game. To quantify the relationship between information flow and audiences' perceived quality, we…
League competition is investigated using random processes and scaling techniques. In our model, a weak team can upset a strong team with a fixed probability. Teams play an equal number of head-to-head matches and the team with the largest…
We examine ``tournament'' second-price auctions in which $N$ bidders compete for the right to participate in a second stage and contend against bidder $N+1$. When the first $N$ bidders are committed so that their bids cannot be changed in…
Challenge the Champ is a simple tournament format, where an ordering of the players -- called a seeding -- is decided. The first player in this order is the initial champ, and faces the next player. The outcome of each match decides the…