Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

payoff

UK/ˈpeɪ.ɒf/US/ˈpeɪ.ɒf/
nounB2Common in everyday speech and writing · #5,601 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: payoffs

A payoff is a reward for what you have done, or a bribe. The payoff came later, a big payoff, a secret payoff.

The honest sense is the return on an effort, and in game theory a payoff is the numerical value of an outcome. The dishonest sense is a bribe paid to make somebody act or keep quiet, and context is all that separates the two.

Definitions of payoff

  1. 1nounpayoffA reward for what you have done, or a bribe.B2

    “After years of hard training, the payoff came when she won the gold medal.”

payoff is a reward.

Where it comes from

pay-off Deverbal from pay off.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

payoff in the wild

  • The payoff depends on the optimal (maximum or minimum) underlying asset's price occurring over the life of the option.

    Lookback option

  • The option allows the holder to "look back" over time to determine the payoff.

    Lookback option

  • The goal of each agent is to consider their payoff based on a competitors action.

    Strategy (game theory)

  • From there, Competitor A compares the payoffs they receive by entering and not entering.

    Strategy (game theory)

  • If one can change the identities of the players without changing the payoff to the strategies, then a game is symmetric.

    Symmetric game

1 / 3

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.