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 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 , by waiting until time 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 . We argue that the -strategy is not a unique minimax strategy and that it can be improved in various ways.
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