Related papers: The standard deviation effect (or why one should s…
Consider a randomly shuffled deck of $2n$ cards with $n$ red cards and $n$ black cards. We study the average number of moves it takes to go from a randomly shuffled deck to a deck that alternates in color by performing the following move:…
We study a class of stochastic dynamic games that exhibit strategic complementarities between players; formally, in the games we consider, the payoff of a player has increasing differences between her own state and the empirical…
There are 134,459 distinct initial hands at the video poker game Jacks or Better, taking suit exchangeability into account. A computer program can determine the optimal strategy (i.e., which cards to hold) for each such hand, but a complete…
We show analytically how the fluctuations (i.e. standard deviation) in the Minority Game (MG) can be made to decrease below the random coin-toss limit if the agents use more general behavioral strategies. This suppression of the standard…
We adapt the method used by Jaynes to derive the equilibria of statistical physics to instead derive equilibria of bounded rational game theory. We analyze the dependence of these equilibria on the parameters of the underlying game,…
We provide the first asymptotic analysis of the Boston Mechanism under equilibrium play in random markets. We provide two results. First, while 63\% of students receive their first preference under truthful reporting-outperforming any other…
Computer calculations for most exact expected values in blackjack have been available since the 1960's, but exact results for pair splitting and resplitting have previously been too computer intensive. This paper describes a new algorithm…
"The chance to win given a certain move" is an easily obtainable quantity from data and often quoted in gaming statistics. It is also the fundamental quantity that reinforcement learning AI bases on. Unfortunately, this conditional…
In systems which exhibit deterministic diffusion, the gross parameter dependence of the diffusion coefficient can often be understood in terms of random walk models. Provided the decay of correlations is fast enough, one can ignore memory…
We consider a game in which players are the vertices of a directed graph. Initially, Nature chooses one player according to some fixed distribution and gives her a buck, which represents the request to perform a chore. After completing the…
In a well-shuffled deck of cards, what is the probability that somewhere in the deck there are adjacent cards of the same rank? What is the average number of adjacent matches? What is the probability distribution for the number of matches?…
In a classical chess round-robin tournament, each of $n$ players wins, draws, or loses a game against each of the other $n-1$ players. A win rewards a player with 1 points, a draw with 1/2 point, and a loss with 0 points. We are interested…
This paper is a comprehensive study of a long observed phenomenon of increase in the stability margin and so the rate of convergence of a class of linear systems due to time delay. We use Lambert W function to determine (a) in what systems…
We consider the Independent Chip Model (ICM) for expected value in poker tournaments. Our first result is that participating in a fair bet with one other player will always lower one's expected value under this model. Our second result is…
Inertia and context-dependent choice effects are well-studied classes of behavioural phenomena. While much is known about these effects in isolation, little is known about whether one of them "dominates" the other when both can potentially…
A new formalism for analyzing the progression of cricket game using Stochastic differential equation (SDE) is introduced. This theory enables a quantitative way of representing every team using three key variables which have physical…
In a competitive sport, every little thing matters. Yet, many sports leave some large levers out of the reach of the teams, and in the hands of fate. In cricket, world's second most popular sport by some measures, one such lever---the…
We study the poor-biased model for money exchange introduced in [2]: agents are being randomly picked at a rate proportional to their current wealth, and then the selected agent gives a dollar to another agent picked uniformly at random.…
In an epsilon-approximate Nash equilibrium, a player can gain at most epsilon in expectation by unilateral deviation. An epsilon well-supported approximate Nash equilibrium has the stronger requirement that every pure strategy used with…
In competitions involving many participants running many races the final rank is determined by the score of each participant, obtained by adding its ranks in each individual race. The "Statistical Curse of the Second Half Rank" is the…