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Motivated by recent studies in human balance control, we study a delayed random walk with an unstable fixed point. It is observed that the random walker moves away from the unstable fixed point more slowly than is observed in the absence of…

Existing approaches for estimating home-field advantage (HFA) include modeling the difference between home and away scores as a function of the difference between home and away team ratings that are treated either as fixed or random…

We consider a mean field game describing the limit of a stochastic differential game of $N$-players whose state dynamics are subject to idiosyncratic and common noise and that can be absorbed when they hit a prescribed region of the state…

Recently Wilson [Ann. Appl. Probab. 14 (2004) 274--325] introduced an important new technique for lower bounding the mixing time of a Markov chain. In this paper we extend Wilson's technique to find lower bounds of the correct order for…

In his list of open problems, Martin Erickson described a certain game: "Two players alternately put queens on an n x n chess board so that each new queen is not in range of any queen already on the board (the color of the queens is…

In the classroom demonstration of a tennis ball dropped on top of a basketball, the surprisingly high bounce of the tennis ball is typically explained using momentum conservation for elastic collisions, with the basketball-floor collision…

Consider the following one player game. A deck containing $m$ copies of $n$ different card types is shuffled uniformly at random. Each round the player tries to guess the next card in the deck, and then the card is revealed and discarded.…

The stochastic multi-armed bandit setting has been recently studied in the non-stationary regime, where the mean payoff of each action is a non-decreasing function of the number of rounds passed since it was last played. This model captures…

The National Football League (NFL) sets its regular season schedule to optimize viewership and minimize competitive inequities. One inequity assumed to impact team performance is rest differential, defined as the relative number of days…

In professional tennis, it is often acknowledged that the server has an initial advantage. Indeed, the majority of points are won by the server, making the serve one of the most important elements in this sport. In this paper, we focus on…

In pickleball doubles with conventional side-out scoring, points are scored only by the serving team. The serve alternates during a game, with each team serving until it has faulted twice, except at the beginning of the game, in which case…

We propose a simple model of inter-bank borrowing and lending where the evolution of the log-monetary reserves of $N$ banks is described by a system of diffusion processes coupled through their drifts in such a way that stability of the…

We consider a 3-player game in the normal form, in which each player has two actions. We assume that the game is symmetric and repeated infinitely many times. At each stage players make their choices knowing only the average payoffs from…

In a zero-sum stochastic game, at each stage, two adversary players take decisions and receive a stage payoff determined by them and by a controlled random variable representing the state of nature. The total payoff is the normalized…

We consider the following card guessing game with no feedback. An ordered deck of n cards labeled 1 up to n is riffle-shuffled exactly one time. Then, the goal of the game is to maximize the number of correct guesses of the cards. One after…

The purpose of this paper is to explore the necessary conditions for optimality of mean-field forward-backward delay control systems. A new estimate is proved, which is a powerfultool to deal with the optimal control problems of mean-field…

We investigate the problem of designing optimal classifiers in the strategic classification setting, where the classification is part of a game in which players can modify their features to attain a favorable classification outcome (while…

We study a model in which two players with opposing interests try to alter a status quo through instability-generating actions. We show that instability can be used to secure longer-term durable changes, even if it is costly to generate and…

We study variants of a stochastic game inspired by backgammon where players may propose to double the stake, with the game state dictated by a one-dimensional random walk. Our variants allow for different numbers of proposals and different…

Each ballpark has a different size in baseball. It could be easily imagined that there would be many home runs in a small ballpark. Moreover, the environment of the ballpark, such as altitude, humidity, air pressure, and wind strength,…