The aim of the present study was to identify the probability of winning each Volleyball set according to game location (home, away). Archival data was obtained from 275 sets in the 2005 Men's Senior World League and 65,949 actions were analysed. Set result (win, loss), game location (home, away), set number (first, second, third, fourth and fifth) and performance indicators (serve, reception, s...

We consider two-player concurrent games played on graphs, where at each state both players choose moves simultaneously and independently. We consider ω-regular winning conditions specified as parity objectives and study the qualitative winning mode, i.e., whether a player can win with probability arbitrarily close to 1 (limit-winning). We provide an efficient reduction from limit-winning concur...

An open system can be modeled as a two-player game between the system and its environment. At each round of the game, player 1 (the system) and player 2 (the environment) independently and simultaneously choose moves, and the two choices determine the next state of the game. Properties of open systems can be modeled as objectives of these two-player games. For the basic objective of reachabilit...

An open system can be modeled as a two-player game between the system and its environment. At each round of the game, player 1 (the system) and player 2 (the environment) independently and simultaneously choose moves, and the two choices determine the next state of the game. Properties of open systems can be modeled as objectives of these two-player games. For the basic objective of reachabilit...

A contest is a game where several players compete for winning prizes by expending costly efforts. A contest success function determines the probability of winning or losing the contest as a function of these efforts. We assume that the outcome of a contest is an ordered partition of the set of players (a ranking) and a contest success function assigns a probability to each possible outcome. We ...

In his book “Mathematical Mind-Benders”, Peter Winkler poses the following open problem, originally due to the first author: “[In the game Peer Pressure,] two players are dealt some number of cards, initially face up, each card carrying a different integer. In each round, the players simultaneously play a card; the higher card is discarded and the lower card passed to the other player. The play...

Online innovation contests have been used by more and more firms for idea seeking and problem solving. Most studies of contests take the perspective of innovation seekers, and little is known about solvers’ strategies and responses. However, contest performance also relies on understanding solver responses. This paper provides insights to these questions. Specifically, we show that past experie...

We study observation-based strategies for partiallyobservable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with omega-regular objectives. An observation-based strategy relies on partial information about the history of a play, namely, on the past sequence of observations. We consider the qualitative analysis problem: given a POMDP with an omega-regular objective, whether there is an observation-based str...

In this paper we study a classical model concerning occurrence of words in a random sequence of letters from an alphabet. The problem can be studied as a game among (m + 1) words: the winning word in this game is the one that occurs first. We prove that the knowledge of the first m words results in an advantage in the construction of the last word, as it has been shown in the literature for the...