Related papers: On cases where Litt's game is fair

The core is a quintessential solution concept for profit sharing in cooperative game theory. An imputation allocates the worth of the given game among its agents. The imputation lies in the core of the game if, for each sub-coalition, the…

The convex grabbing game is a game where two players, Alice and Bob, alternate taking extremal points from the convex hull of a point set on the plane. Rational weights are given to the points. The goal of each player is to maximize the…

A combinatorial game is a two-player game without hidden information or chance elements. The main object of combinatorial game theory is to obtain the outcome, which player has a winning strategy, of a given combinatorial game. Positions of…

The aim of this paper is to solve the "gift exchange" problem: you are one of n players, and there are n wrapped gifts on display; when your turn comes, you can either choose any of the remaining wrapped gifts, or you can "steal" a gift…

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…

We study a contest in which $N$ players sequentially draw from a distribution as many times as they want at a fixed cost per draw, with no recall, and the highest accepted value wins a prize. In the unique symmetric equilibrium, the…

We characterize the class of symmetric two-player games in which tit-for-tat cannot be beaten even by very sophisticated opponents in a repeated game. It turns out to be the class of exact potential games. More generally, there is a class…

We introduce and analyze a natural game formulated as follows. In this one-person game, the player is given a random permutation $A=(a_1,\dots, a_n)$ of a multiset $M$ of $n$ reals that sum up to $0$, where each of the $n!$ permutation…

A game is played by a team of two --- say Alice and Bob --- in which the value of a random variable $x$ is revealed to Alice only, who cannot freely communicate with Bob. Instead, she is given a quantum $n$-level system, respectively a…

In Zeng et al. [Fluct. Noise Lett. 7 (2007) L439--L447] the analysis of the lowest unique positive integer game is simplified by some reasonable assumptions that make the problem tractable for arbitrary numbers of players. However, here we…

Wordle is a popular, online word game offered by the New York Times (nytimes.com). Currently there are some 2 million players of the English version worldwide. Players have 6 attempts to guess the daily word (target word) and after each…

A sequence S is nonrepetitive if no two adjacent blocks of S are the same. In 1906 Thue proved that there exist arbitrarily long nonrepetitive sequences over 3 symbols. We consider the online variant of this result in which a nonrepetitive…

Consider a well-shuffled deck of cards of $n$ different types where each type occurs $m$ times. In a complete feedback game, a player is asked to guess the top card from the deck. After each guess, the top card is revealed to the player and…

In this expository note, we discuss a ``balls-and-urns'' probability puzzle posed by Daniel Litt.

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 study a sequential coin-flipping game in which a player starts with~$n$ coins, each landing heads independently with probability~$p$. In each round the player flips all remaining coins and must set aside at least one coin showing heads;…

Zeckendorf proved that every positive integer $n$ can be written uniquely as the sum of non-adjacent Fibonacci numbers; a similar result, though with a different notion of a legal decomposition, holds for many other sequences. We use these…

To an adult, it's obvious that the day of someone's death is not precisely determined by the day of birth, but it's a very different story for a child. When the third named author was four years old he asked his father, the fifth named…

We consider a class of auctions (Lowest Unique Bid Auctions) that have achieved a considerable success on the Internet. Bids are made in cents (of euro) and every bidder can bid as many numbers as she wants. The lowest unique bid wins the…

We prove several versions of N. Alon's "necklace-splitting theorem", subject to additional constraints, as illustrated by the following results. (1) The "almost equicardinal necklace-splitting theorem" claims that, without increasing the…