Puzzle: a drunkard and a cliff
This article is about a classic brain teaser that is tantalizingly easy to state but much harder to solve. I came across the puzzle in Frederick Mosteller's Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability with Solutions: From where he stands, one step toward the cliff would send the drunken man over the edge. He ...

Gifts for economists, 2010
It's that time of the year where I try to answer the following question: what would you get an economist? There are plenty of good ideas in my previous guides, so you may want to get started there: --Gifts for economists, 2008 --Gifts for economists, 2009 This year's list adds on a few more ...

Quick puzzle: how long to get to heaven?
For today, just a fun brain teaser that was passed along to me. A person dies and arrives at the gates to heaven. There are three identical doors: one of them leads to heaven, another leads to a 1-day stay in limbo, and then back to the gate, and the other ...

The Mind Your Decisions forum is up
At the request of a few readers, I've added a feature to the site I hope you'll find useful: a discussion forum. Here's a link to the forum. Why a forum? There are a couple of main reasons: Connect with other readers As the blog has grown, so has the community. There are ...

An interesting probability game
I came across a fascinating puzzle while perusing the book Game Theory Evolving. This problem is a bit more challenging mathematically, but I hope some of you will find it interesting. Here it is: Bob tells Alice to draw repeatedly from the uniform distribution on [0,1] until her current draw is less ...

A rock-paper-scissors game in poker
In Texas Holdem, the best starting hand is pocket aces. This hand is favored against any other starting hand, and it's almost always a simple decision to play this hand pre-flop and play it aggressively. With other starting hands, it's a more complicated decision. The odds of winning depend on what ...

The trust game and wealth creation
There's a fascinating article discussing game theory and wealth creation over at financial-planning.com titled Winning the Trust Game The article is a quick read and I highly suggest checking it out. Here are a few points that I found interesting: The Trust Game