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A Unified Approach for Solving Sequential Selection Problems

Probability 2020-01-27 v5 Statistics Theory Statistics Theory

Abstract

In this paper we develop a unified approach for solving a wide class of sequential selection problems. This class includes, but is not limited to, selection problems with no-information, rank-dependent rewards, and considers both fixed as well as random problem horizons. The proposed framework is based on a reduction of the original selection problem to one of optimal stopping for a sequence of judiciously constructed independent random variables. We demonstrate that our approach allows exact and efficient computation of optimal policies and various performance metrics thereof for a variety of sequential selection problems, several of which have not been solved to date.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1901.04183,
  title  = {A Unified Approach for Solving Sequential Selection Problems},
  author = {Alexander Goldenshluger and Yaakov Malinovsky and Assaf Zeevi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.04183},
  year   = {2020}
}