Related papers: Jackpot statistics, a physicist's approach
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…
Lottery is a game in which multiple players take chances in the hope of getting some rewards in cash or kind. In addition, from the time of the early civilizations, lottery has also been considered as an apposite method to allocate scarce…
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…
The allocation of resources plays an important role in the completion of system objectives and tasks, especially in the presence of strategic adversaries. Optimal allocation strategies are becoming increasingly more complex, given that…
One of the most popular lottery games worldwide is the so-called ``lotto k/N''. It considers N numbers 1,2,...,N from which k are drawn randomly, without replacement. A player selects k or more numbers and the first prize is shared amongst…
We look at the Florida Lottery records of winners of prizes worth $600 or more. Some individuals claimed large numbers of prizes. Were they lucky, or up to something? We distinguish the "plausibly lucky" from the "implausibly lucky" by…
The design of sparse neural networks, i.e., of networks with a reduced number of parameters, has been attracting increasing research attention in the last few years. The use of sparse models may significantly reduce the computational and…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) remains expensive, particularly because the rollout is expensive. Decoupling rollout generation from policy optimization (e.g., leveraging a more efficient model to rollout) could…
Simple stochastic games are turn-based 2.5-player games with a reachability objective. The basic question asks whether one player can ensure reaching a given target with at least a given probability. A natural extension is games with a…
Unusually large prize pools in lotteries like Mega Millions and Powerball attract additional bettors, which increases the likelihood that multiple winners will have to share the pool. Thus, the expected value of a lottery ticket decreases…
The Labouchere gambling system is hypothesized to increase the probability of winning a predetermined arbitrary profit in a gambling system such as a coin flip or a roulette game in which both payouts and odds are 1:1. However, use of the…
We present a framework for analyzing the near miss effect in lotteries. A decision maker (DM) facing a lottery, falsely interprets losing outcomes that are close to winning ones, as a sign that success is within reach. As a result of this…
We show that, in a resource allocation problem, the ex ante aggregate utility of players with cumulative-prospect-theoretic preferences can be increased over deterministic allocations by implementing lotteries. We formulate an optimization…
For a family of multidimensional gambler models we provide formulas for the winning probabilities (in terms of parameters of the system) and for the distribution of game duration (in terms of eigenvalues of underlying one-dimensional…
Logit dynamics is a form of randomized game dynamics where players have a bias towards strategic deviations that give a higher improvement in cost. It is used extensively in practice. In congestion (or potential) games, the dynamics…
We study two-player (zero-sum) concurrent mean-payoff games played on a finite-state graph. We focus on the important sub-class of ergodic games where all states are visited infinitely often with probability 1. The algorithmic study of…
A mean-field like stochastic evolution equation with growth and reset terms (LGGR model) is used to model wealth distribution in modern societies. The stationary solution of the model leads to an analytical form for the density function…
We consider 2-player zero-sum stochastic games where each player controls his own state variable living in a compact metric space. The terminology comes from gambling problems where the state of a player represents its wealth in a casino.…
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of online gambling sites, which made gambling more accessible with a consequent rise in related problems, such as addiction. Hence, the analysis of the gambling behaviour at both the…
The main purpose of this study is to introduce a semi-classical model describing betting scenarios in which, at variance with conventional approaches, the payoff of the gambler is encoded into the internal degrees of freedom of a quantum…