Related papers: Late comment on Astumian's paradox
Shapley (1953) introduced two-player zero-sum discounted stochastic games, henceforth stochastic games, a model where a state variable follows a two-controlled Markov chain, the players receive rewards at each stage which add up to $0$, and…
We consider two-player stochastic games played on a finite graph for infinitely many rounds. Stochastic games generalize both Markov decision processes (MDP) by adding an adversary player, and two-player deterministic games by adding…
Differential games with asymmetric information were introduced by Cardaliaguet (2007). As in repeated games with lack of information on both sides (Aumann and Maschler (1995)), each player receives a private signal (his type) before the…
This chapter surveys progress on three related topics in perturbations of Markov chains: the motivating question of when and how "perturbed" MCMC chains are developed, the theoretical problem of how perturbation theory can be used to…
That there exist two losing games that can be combined, either by random mixture or by nonrandom alternation, to form a winning game is known as Parrondo's paradox. We establish a strong law of large numbers and a central limit theorem for…
Inspired by the flashing ratchet, Parrondo's game presents an apparently paradoxical situation. Parrondo's game consists of two individual games, game A and game B. Game A is a slightly losing coin-tossing game. Game B has two coins, with…
In 1973 Fraenkel discovered interesting sequences which split the positive integers. These sequences became famous, because of a related unsolved conjecture. Here we construct combinatorial games, with `playable' rulesets, with these…
Mean field games is a recent area of study introduced by Lions and Lasry in a series of seminal papers in 2006. Mean field games model situations of competition between large number of rational agents that play non-cooperative dynamic games…
This paper presents a simple algorithm to check whether reachability probabilities in parametric Markov chains are monotonic in (some of) the parameters. The idea is to construct - only using the graph structure of the Markov chain and…
Finite games in normal form and their mixed extensions are a corner stone of noncooperative game theory. Often generic finite games and their mixed extensions are considered. But the properties which one expects in generic games and the…
We propose a game-theoretic framework that incorporates both incomplete information and general ambiguity attitudes on factors external to all players. Our starting point is players' preferences on payoff-distribution vectors, essentially…
Recent development in quantum computation and quantum information theory allows to extend the scope of game theory for the quantum world. The paper presents the history, basic ideas and recent development in quantum game theory. In this…
We consider the computational task of sampling a bit string $x$ from a distribution $\pi(x)=|\langle x|\psi\rangle|^2$, where $\psi$ is the unique ground state of a local Hamiltonian $H$. Our main result describes a direct link between the…
Traditional game theory assumes that the players in the game are aware of the rules of the game. However, in practice, often the players are unaware or have only partial knowledge about the game they are playing. They may also have…
Card shuffling models have provided simple motivating examples for the mathematical theory of mixing times for Markov chains. As a complement, we introduce a more intricate realistic model of a certain observable real-world scheme for…
The main topic of these notes are Markov loops, studied in the context of continuous time Markov chains on discrete state spaces. We refer to [1] and [2] for the short "history" of the subject. In contrast with these references, symmetry is…
We consider a two-player game of war of attrition under complete information. It is well-known that this class of games admits equilibria in pure, as well as mixed strategies, and much of the literature has focused on the latter. We show…
Perturbation theory for Markov chains addresses the question how small differences in the transitions of Markov chains are reflected in differences between their distributions. We prove powerful and flexible bounds on the distance of the…
This paper studies a multi-player, general-sum stochastic game characterized by a dual-stage temporal structure per period. The agents face uncertainty regarding the time-evolving state that is realized at the beginning of each period.…
The game of Knockout is a classic playground game played with two basketballs. This paper uses a Markov process to analyze each player's probability of winning the game given their starting position in line and shooting percentages,…