Bounding Bernoulli trials by the standard Bernoulli process

expected valueprobability

Suppose we have a Bernoulli-like process $P$. At each step a coin is tossed and the outcome ("success", "failure") is recorded. What differentiate $P$ from the standard Bernoulli process, is that we pick a probability of "success" uniformly at random in range $(1/2, 1)$ at each step before we toss the coin.

I'm interested in finding an upper bound on the expected number of trials
until the first "success" is tossed.

What I have thought, if the probability of "success" is at least $1/2$, then at each step $P$ is more probable to stop than a standard Bernoulli process, therefore an expectation of a standard geometrically distributed variable bounds from above the expectation of steps until the first "success".

How can I make this claim formal?

Best Answer

As David K states implies, your process is exactly a Bernoulli process with non-random success probability $p=3/4$. The expected number of flips is then $4/3\approx1.333$.

Your argument & approach are good. You can* construct an iid sequence $U_i$ of $U[0,1]$ variables and another, $S_i$, iid $U[1/2,1]$, and consider the sequence of coupled binary outcomes $(X_i,Y_i)$ where $X_i = 1$ exactly when $U_i\le 1/2$ and $Y_i = 1$ exactly when $U_i\le S_i$. Then the $X_i$ process has the same probability distribution as the standard Bernoulli process and the $Y_i$ process has the same probability distribution as your $P$ process, and $X_i\le Y_i$ with probability $1$.

Footnote: If you are afraid your original probability space $(\Omega,\mathcal A, P)$ is not rich enough to support all these newly constructed rvs, don't worry. It is rich enough to support a $U[1/2,1]$ random variable, and hence is a so-called standard probability space. If it supports a uniform rv, that rv's binary digits are an iid sequence of fair coin flips, and by Cantor, a countable sequence of such sequences, and thus a countable sequence of uniforms, and so on. The resulting $X_i$ and $Y_i$ constructed this way will not be equal $\omega$ by $\omega$ to what you started out with, but will have the same distributional properties.

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