Motivated by classical nontransitivity paradoxes, we call an
-tuple
cyclic if there exist independent random variables
with
for
such
that
for
and
. We call
the tuple
nontransitive if it is cyclic and in addition satisfies
for
all
.
Let
(resp. )
denote the probability that a randomly chosen
-tuple
is cyclic (resp. nontransitive).
We determine
and
exactly, while for
we give upper and
lower bounds for
that show that
converges to
as
.
We also determine the distribution of the smallest, middle, and largest elements in a
cyclic triple.
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