English

How to beat the 1/e-strategy of best choice (the random arrivals problem)

Probability 2021-03-09 v2

Abstract

In the best choice problem with random arrivals, an unknown number nn of rankable items arrive at times sampled from the uniform distribution. As is well known, a real-time player can ensure stopping at the overall best item with probability at least 1/e1/e, by waiting until time 1/e1/e then selecting the first relatively best item to appear (if any). This paper discusses the issue of dominance in a wide class of stopping strategies of best choice, and argues that in fact the player faces a trade-off between success probabilities for various values of nn. We argue that the 1/e1/e-strategy is not a unique minimax strategy and that it can be improved in various ways.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.10672,
  title  = {How to beat the 1/e-strategy of best choice (the random arrivals problem)},
  author = {Alexander Gnedin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.10672},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

15 pages, 1 figure