The equalization probability of the Polya urn

Abstract

We consider a Polya urn, started with b black and w white balls, where b>w. We compute the probability that there are ever the same number of black and white balls in the urn, and show that it is twice the probability of getting no more than w-1 heads in b+w-1 tosses of a fair coin.

References in corpus (1)

• First Passage Properties of the Polya Urn Process

Cited by in corpus (2)

• On the duration and intensity of cumulative advantage competitions
• The dominating colour of an infinite Pólya urn model