Related papers: Optimizing over iid distributions and the Beat the…
Traditionally quantitative games such as mean-payoff games and discount sum games have two players -- one trying to maximize the payoff, the other trying to minimize it. The associated decision problem, "Can Eve (the maximizer) achieve, for…
We study the phenomenon of intransitivity in models of dice and voting. First, we follow a recent thread of research for $n$-sided dice with pairwise ordering induced by the probability, relative to $1/2$, that a throw from one die is…
In the game "Super Six", after successfully getting rid of a stick by rolling with the die a number that is not occupied, the player has the choice to continue to roll the die or to stop and to hand over the die to their opponent. The…
We consider the generalized game Lights Out played on a graph and investigate the following question: for a given positive integer $n$, what is the probability that a graph chosen uniformly at random from the set of graphs with $n$ vertices…
We consider a general class of round-robin tournament models of equally strong players. In these models, each of the $n$ players competes against every other player exactly once. For each match between two players, the outcome is a value…
In this paper we examine problems motivated by on-line financial problems and stochastic games. In particular, we consider a sequence of entirely arbitrary distinct values arriving in random order, and must devise strategies for selecting…
In the Penney-Ante game, Player I chooses a head/tail string of a predetermined length $n\ge3$. Player II, upon seeing Player I's choice, chooses another head/tail string of the same length. A coin is then tossed repeatedly and the player…
The prediction of the final state probabilities of a general cuboid randomly thrown onto a surface is a problem that naturally arises in the minds of men and women familiar with regular cubic dice and the basic concepts of probability.…
Mean-payoff games on timed automata are played on the infinite weighted graph of configurations of priced timed automata between two players, Player Min and Player Max, by moving a token along the states of the graph to form an infinite…
We study the problem of learning a most biased coin among a set of coins by tossing the coins adaptively. The goal is to minimize the number of tosses until we identify a coin i* whose posterior probability of being most biased is at least…
We characterize the optimal reward functions (scoring rules) that incentivize an agent to acquire information and report it truthfully to the principal. The optimal scoring rules let the agent make a simple binary bet in single-dimensional…
We study multi-item profit maximization when there is an underlying distribution over buyers' values. In practice, a full description of the distribution is typically unavailable, so we study the setting where the mechanism designer only…
Assignment games represent a tractable yet versatile model of two-sided markets with transfers. We study the likely properties of the core of randomly generated assignment games. If the joint productivities of every firm and worker are…
In the cup game, an adversary distributes 1 unit of water among $n$ cups every time step. The player then selects a single cup from which to remove 1 unit of water. In the bamboo trimming problem, the adversary must choose fixed rates for…
In this paper, we consider zero-sum repeated games in which the maximizer is restricted to strategies requiring no more than a limited amount of randomness. Particularly, we analyze the maxmin payoff of the maximizer in two models: the…
We study a variant of the chip-firing game called the diffusion game. In the diffusion game, we begin with some integer labelling of the vertices of a graph, interpreted as a number of chips on each vertex, and then for each subsequent step…
The game show Lucky 13 differs from other television game shows in that contestants are required to place a bet on their own knowledge of trivia by selecting a range that contains the number of questions that they answered correctly. We…
The game of Cops and Robbers is a well known game played on graphs. In this paper we consider the class of graphs of bounded diameter. We improve the strategy of cops and previously used probabilistic method which results in an improved…
We propose a generic mechanism for incentivizing behavior in an arbitrary finite game using payments. Doing so is trivial if the mechanism is allowed to observe all actions taken in the game, as this allows it to simply punish those agents…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…