Prophet Compared to Gambler: An Inequality for Transforms of Processes

Abstract

A prophet is a player with complete foresight; a gambler knows only the past and the present, but not the future. If each of them bets on differences of consecutive nonnegative random variables $X_i$ such that $E(X_i|X_{i - 1}) = EX_i$, the players multiplying their stakes by uniformly bounded variables, then the expected gain of the prophet is at most three times that of the gambler. The constant 3 is optimal.