The key element of models of contest is the Contest Success Function (CSF) which specifies the winning probabilities of agents. We provide an axiomatization of two parametric families of CSF’s. In the first, the winning probability of each agent depends on the investments and a vector of parameters, where each parameter is specific to one of the contestants. In the second, the winning probabili...

Franc J.G.M. Klaassen, PhD (1) and Prof. Jan R. Magnus, PhD (2) 1. Department of Economics, University of Amsterdam, Roetersstraat 11, 1018 WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Tel: +31-205254191, Fax: +31-20-5254254. E-mail: [email protected]. 2. CentER for Economic Research, Tilburg University, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands. Tel: +31-13-4663092, Fax: +31-134663066. E-mail: magnus@u...

How do people manipulate their environment when balancing trade-offs between probability of success and payoff? Individuals in a city park played a simple lottery using a small set of marbles placed in an urn. Participants had the ability to actively improve their chances of winning but only by reducing the amount of money that they could possibly win. Hence, participants controlled the lottery...

The development of an autonomous agent that plays Poker at human level is a very difficult task since the agent has to deal with problems like the existence of hidden information, deception and risk management. To solve these problems, Poker agents use opponent modeling to predict the opponents next move and thereby determine its next action. In this paper are described several methods to measu...

Parrondo’s paradox [1–4] shows that the combination of two losing strategies can lead to a winning result. The paradox can be phrased in terms of very simple gambling games in which some unit (say, 1 euro) is won or lost with a given probability. We can imagine that the games consist on tossing different biased coins and that a “capital” C(t) is built. Every time a game is played (a coin is tos...

Spending on big-time college athletics is often justified on the grounds that athletic success attracts students and raises donations. We exploit data on bookmaker spreads to estimate the probability of winning each game for college football teams. We then condition on these probabilities using a propensity score design to estimate the effects of winning on donations, applications, and enrollme...

In a two-person red-and-black game, each player holds an integral amount of chips. At each stage of the game, each player can bet any integral amount in his possession, winning the chips of his opponent with a probability which is a function of the ratio of his bet to the sum of both players’ bets and is called a win probability function. Both players seek to maximize the probability of winning...

In the United States electoral system, a candidate is elected indirectly by winning a majority of electoral votes cast by individual states, the election usually being decided by the votes cast by a small number of " swing states " where the two candidates historically have roughly equal probabilities of winning. The effective value of a swing state in deciding the election is determined not on...