IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/18060.html

Fortune's Formula or the Road to Ruin? The Generalized Kelly Criterion With Multiple Outcomes

Author

Listed:
  • Whelan, Karl

Abstract

You can bet on an event where there are multiple possible winners but only one will actually win. At the odds offered, you think there may be multiple bets worth taking. How much do you place on each bet to maximize your expected utility? We describe how this problem can be solved for concave utility functions and illustrate the properties of the solution. The optimal betting strategy is more aggressive than strategies derived from considering each outcome separately such as the Kelly criterion. The strategy also recommends sometimes placing bets with negative expected returns because they act as hedges against losses on other bets. While this strategy maximizes the bettor's subjective expected utility, if betting odds incorporate a profit margin and reflect underlying probabilities correctly, then this more aggressive approach loses more money and results in lower realized utility.

Suggested Citation

  • Whelan, Karl, 2023. "Fortune's Formula or the Road to Ruin? The Generalized Kelly Criterion With Multiple Outcomes," CEPR Discussion Papers 18060, Centre for Economic Policy Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:18060
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cepr.org/publications/DP18060
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Christopher D. Long, 2026. "Utility-Invariant Support Selection and Eventwise Decoupling for Simultaneous Independent Multi-Outcome Bets," Papers 2603.24064, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:18060. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CEPR (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cepr.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.