Related papers: The inspection paradox in stochastic resetting
If time travel is possible, it seems to inevitably lead to paradoxes. These include consistency paradoxes, such as the famous grandfather paradox, and bootstrap paradoxes, where something is created out of nothing. One proposed class of…
The Braess paradox describes the counterintuitive situation that the addition of new roads to road networks can lead to higher travel times for all network users. Recently we could show that user optima leading to the paradox exist in…
Performance modeling is a key issue in queuing theory and operation research. It is well-known that the length of a queue that awaits service or the time spent by a job in a queue depends not only on the service rate, but also crucially on…
The occurrence of Simpson's paradox (SP) in $2\times 2$ contingency tables has been well studied. The present work comprehensively revisits this problem using a combination of philosophical reflections, causal considerations, and…
The laws of chance are often subtle and deceptive. This is why games of chance work. People are convinced that they obey seemingly intuitive laws, while the underlying mathematical structure reveals a different and more complex reality.…
The definition of probabilities in eternally inflating universes requires a measure to regulate the infinite spacetime volume, and much of the current literature uses a global time cutoff for this purpose. Such measures have been found to…
Resetting a stochastic process has been shown to expedite the completion time of some complex tasks, such as finding a target for the first time. Here we consider the cost of resetting by associating to each reset a cost, which is a…
By periodically returning a search process to a known or random state, random resetting possesses the potential to unveil new trajectories, sidestep potential obstacles, and consequently enhance the efficiency of locating desired targets.…
We present a new experiment demonstrating destructive interference in customers' estimates of conditional probabilities of product failure. We take the perspective of a manufacturer of consumer products, and consider two situations of cause…
In studying randomized search heuristics, a frequent quantity of interest is the first time a (real-valued) stochastic process obtains (or passes) a certain value. The processes under investigation commonly show a bias towards this goal,…
The friendship paradox implies that a person will, on average, have fewer friends than their friends do. Prior work has shown how the friendship paradox can lead to perception biases regarding behaviors that correlate with the number of…
Over the past two decades, numerous studies have demonstrated how less predictable (i.e., higher surprisal) words take more time to read. In general, these studies have implicitly assumed the reading process is purely responsive: Readers…
Resetting has been shown to reduce the completion time for a stochastic process, such as the first passage time for a diffusive searcher to find a target. The time between two consecutive resetting events is drawn from a waiting time…
The theory of stochastic resetting asserts that restarting a stochastic process can expedite its completion. In this paper, we study the escape process of a Brownian particle in an open Hamiltonian system that suffers noise-enhanced…
The Informational Braess' Paradox (IBP) illustrates a counterintuitive scenario where revelation of additional roadway segments to some self-interested travelers leads to increased travel times for these individuals. IBP extends the…
The twin paradox is the best known thought experiment associated with Einstein's theory of relativity. An astronaut who makes a journey into space in a high-speed rocket will return home to find he has aged less than a twin who stayed on…
The "friendship paradox" (Feld1991) refers to the fact that, on average, people have strictly fewer friends than their friends have. I show that this over-sampling of the most popular people amplifies behaviors that involve…
Recently noticed ability of restart to reduce the expected completion time of first-passage processes allows appealing opportunities for performance improvement in a variety of settings. However, complex stochastic processes often exhibit…
We analyze extensions of the Poisson process in which any interarrival time that exceeds a fixed value $r$ is counted as an interarrival of duration $r$. In the engineering application that initiated this work, one part is tested at a time,…
The blocking problem naturally arises in transportation systems as multiple vehicles with different itineraries share available resources. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the blocking problem to the waiting time at the…