相关论文: Some people have all the luck

Multi-round competitions often double or triple the points awarded in the final round, calling it a bonus, to maximize spectators' excitement. In a two-player competition with $n$ rounds, we aim to derive the optimal bonus size to maximize…

The General Lotto game is a popular variant of the famous Colonel Blotto game, in which two opposing players allocate limited resources over many battlefields. In this paper, we consider incomplete and asymmetric information formulations…

Lottery is a game in which multiple players take chances in the hope of getting some rewards in cash or kind. In addition, from the time of the early civilizations, lottery has also been considered as an apposite method to allocate scarce…

We study a setting where tickets for an experience are allocated by lottery. Each agent belongs to a group, and a group is successful if and only if its members receive enough tickets for everyone. A lottery is efficient if it maximizes the…

We report a new result on lotteries --- that a well-funded syndicate has a purely mechanical strategy to achieve expected returns of 10\% to 25\% in an equiprobable lottery with no take and no carryover pool. We prove that an optimal…

A decision maker observes the evolving state of the world while constantly trying to predict the next state given the history of past states. The ability to benefit from such predictions depends not only on the ability to recognize patters…

What is the relationship between plausibility logic and the principle of maximum entropy? When does the principle give unreasonable or wrong results? When is it appropriate to use the rule `expectation = average'? Can plausibility logic…

In this paper we consider a scenario where there are several algorithms for solving a given problem. Each algorithm is associated with a probability of success and a cost, and there is also a penalty for failing to solve the problem. The…

I think we can agree that dealing with uncertainty is not easy. Probability is the main tool for dealing with uncertainty, and we know there are many probability-related puzzles and paradoxes. Here I describe a rather idiosyncratic…

The beautiful theory of statistical gambling, started by Dubins and Savage (for subfair games) and continued by Kelly and Breiman (for superfair games) has mostly been studied under the unrealistic assumption that we live in a continuous…

The Labouchere gambling system is hypothesized to increase the probability of winning a predetermined arbitrary profit in a gambling system such as a coin flip or a roulette game in which both payouts and odds are 1:1. However, use of the…

Two losing gambling games, when alternated in a periodic or random fashion, can produce a winning game. This paradox has been inspired by certain physical systems capable of rectifying fluctuations: the so-called Brownian ratchets. In this…

Game theory is the study of tractable games which may be used to model more complex systems. Board games, video games and sports, however, are intractable by design, so "ludological" theories about these games as complex phenomena should be…

How much does luck matter to a criminal defendant in a jury trial? We use rich data on jury selection to causally estimate how parties who are randomly assigned a less favorable jury (as proxied by whether their attorneys exhaust their…

The laws of chance are often subtle and deceptive. This is why games of chance work. People are convinced that they obey seemingly intuitive laws, while the underlying mathematical structure reveals a different and more complex reality.…

A (possibly illegal) game of chance, which is described in Chapter 14 of Marc Elsberg's thriller "GREED", seems to offer an excellent chance of winning. However, as the gambling starts and evolves over several rounds, the actual experience…

While traditional economics assumes that humans are fully rational agents who always maximize their expected utility, in practice, we constantly observe apparently irrational behavior. One explanation is that people have limited…

The game show Lucky 13 differs from other television game shows in that contestants are required to place a bet on their own knowledge of trivia by selecting a range that contains the number of questions that they answered correctly. We…

The following problem is considered. Two players are each required to allocate a quota of~$n$ counters among~$k$ boxes labelled~$1,2,\ldots,k$. At times $t=1,2,3,\ldots$ a random box is identified; the probability of choosing box~$i$…

A casino offers the following game. There are three cups each containing a die. You are being told that the dice in the cups are all the same, but possibly nonstandard. For a bet of \$1, the game master shakes all three cups and lets you…