Related papers: Improving on bold play when the gambler is restric…
We calculated a fixed strategy that minimizes the average number of guesses (minimum strategy) for the number-guessing game MOO by exhaustive search. Although the minimum strategy for a similar game, mastermind, has been reported, this…
Consider a gambler and a prophet who observe a sequence of independent, non-negative numbers. The gambler sees the numbers one-by-one whereas the prophet sees the entire sequence at once. The goal of both is to decide on fractions of each…
We determine the optimal strategy for investing in a Black-Scholes market in order to maximize the probability that wealth at death meets a bequest goal $b$, a type of goal-seeking problem, as pioneered by Dubins and Savage (1965, 1976).…
The winning condition of a parity game with costs requires an arbitrary, but fixed bound on the cost incurred between occurrences of odd colors and the next occurrence of a larger even one. Such games quantitatively extend parity games…
The multi-armed bandit is a concise model for the problem of iterated decision-making under uncertainty. In each round, a gambler must pull one of $K$ arms of a slot machine, without any foreknowledge of their payouts, except that they are…
We consider multiplayer stochastic games in which the payoff of each player is a bounded and Borel-measurable function of the infinite play. By using a generalization of the technique of Martin (1998) and Maitra and Sudderth (1998), we show…
This work explains how to utilize earlier results by P. Diaconis, K. Houston-Edwards and the second author to estimate probabilities related to the 4-player gambler ruin problem. For instance, we show that the probability that a very…
We consider 2-players, 2-values minimization games where the players' costs take on two values, $a,b$, $a<b$. The players play mixed strategies and their costs are evaluated by unimodal valuations. This broad class of valuations includes…
We study the Online Bookmaking problem, where a bookmaker dynamically updates betting odds on the possible outcomes of an event. In each betting round, the bookmaker can adjust the odds based on the cumulative betting behavior of gamblers,…
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…
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,…
Each of two players, by turns, rolls a dice several times accumulating the successive scores until he decides to stop, or he rolls an ace. When stopping, the accumulated turn score is added to the player account and the dice is given to his…
We investigate the behavior of experts who seek to make predictions with maximum impact on an audience. At a known future time, a certain continuous random variable will be realized. A public prediction gradually converges to the outcome,…
Free order prophet inequalities bound the ratio between the expected value obtained by two parties each selecting a value from a set of independent random variables: a "prophet" who knows the value of each variable and may select the…
We study a strategic experimentation game with exponential bandits, in which experiment outcomes are private. The equilibrium amount of experimentation is always higher than in the benchmark case where experiment outcomes are publicly…
We show that a pair of Kolmogorov-Loveland betting strategies cannot win on every non-Martin-L\"of random sequence if either of the two following conditions is true: (I) There is an unbounded computable function $g$ such that both betting…
We construct several definitions of imbalance and playability, both of which are related to the existence of dominated strategies. Specifically, a maximally balanced game and a playable game cannot have dominated strategies for any player.…
We consider a stochastic model of investment on an asset of a stock market for a prudent investor. She decides to buy permanent goods with a fraction $\a$ of the maximum amount of money owned in her life in order that her economic level…
We introduce a general framework for continuous-time betting markets, in which a bookmaker can dynamically control the prices of bets on outcomes of random events. In turn, the prices set by the bookmaker affect the rate or intensity of…
We present a modification of the so-called Parrondo's paradox where one is allowed to choose in each turn the game that a large number of individuals play. It turns out that, by choosing the game which gives the highest average earnings at…