Related papers: The Hollyfeld Gambit in Astrophysics
The Shapiro conjecture in the real Schubert calculus fails to hold for flag manifolds, but in a very interesting way. In this extended abstract, we give a refinement of that conjecture for the flag manifold and present massive…
We describe the probability theory behind a casino game, blackjack, and the procedure to compute the optimal strategy for a deck of arbitrary cards and player's expected win given that he follows the optimal strategy. The exact blackjack…
The Monty Hall puzzle has been solved and dissected in many ways, but always using probabilistic arguments, so it is considered a probability puzzle. In this paper the puzzle is set up as an orthodox statistical problem involving an unknown…
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…
This paper studies a generalized variant of the Colonel Blotto game, referred to as the Colonel Blotto game with costs. Unlike the classic Colonel Blotto game, which imposes the use-it-or-lose-it budget assumption, the Colonel Blotto game…
We consider extensive form win-lose games over a complete binary-tree of depth $n$ where players act in an alternating manner. We study arguably the simplest random structure of payoffs over such games where 0/1 payoffs in the leafs are…
No matter how much some gamblers occasionally win, as long as they continue to gamble, sooner or later they will lose more to the casino, which is the so-called long bet will lose. Our results demonstrate the counter-intuitive phenomenon,…
We consider games of chance played by someone with external capital that cannot be applied to the game and determine how this affects risk-adjusted optimal betting. Specifically, we focus on Kelly optimization as a metric, optimizing the…
An important but understudied question in economics is how people choose when facing uncertainty in the timing of events. Here we study preferences over time lotteries, in which the payment amount is certain but the payment time is…
Kelly criterion, that maximizes the expectation value of the logarithm of wealth for bookmaker bets, gives an advantage over different class of strategies. We use projective symmetries for a explanation of this fact. Kelly's approach allows…
We present some new analytical expressions for the so-called Parrondo effect, where simple coin-flipping games with negative expected value are combined into a winning game. Parrondo games are state-dependent. By identifying the game state…
Sports betting markets are proven real-world laboratories to test theories of asset pricing anomalies and risky behaviour. Using a high-frequency dataset provided directly by a major bookmaker, containing the odds and amounts staked…
Strategic decisions are often made over multiple periods of time, wherein decisions made earlier impact a competitor's success in later stages. In this paper, we study these dynamics in General Lotto games, a class of models describing the…
We study the probability distribution of stock returns at mesoscopic time lags (return horizons) ranging from about an hour to about a month. While at shorter microscopic time lags the distribution has power-law tails, for mesoscopic times…
We analyze what happens to the average duration of a game of Chutes and Ladders as the probability of rolling $\delta \in \{ 1,2,3,4,5,6\}$ approaches 100%. We utilize Markov models, and Monte Carlo simulations in Python. We also introduce…
In simple card games, cards are dealt one at a time and the player guesses each card sequentially. We study problems where feedback (e.g. correct/incorrect) is given after each guess. For decks with repeated values (as in blackjack where…
There have been long-standing controversies and inconsistencies over the experiment setup and criteria for identifying the "winning ticket" in literature. To reconcile such, we revisit the definition of lottery ticket hypothesis, with…
We describe a simple probabilistic method to cross-identify astrophysical sources from different catalogs and provide the probability that a source is associated with a source from another catalog or that it has no counterpart. When the…
The Shapiro conjecture in the real Schubert calculus, while likely true for Grassmannians, fails to hold for flag manifolds, but in a very interesting way. We give a refinement of the Shapiro conjecture for the flag manifold and present…
In 2024, Daniel Litt posed a simple coinflip game pitting Alice's "Heads-Heads" vs Bob's "Heads-Tails": who is more likely to win if they score 1 point per occurrence of their substring in a sequence of n fair coinflips? This attracted over…