English

Single Sample Prophet Inequality for Uniform Matroids of Rank 2

Computer Science and Game Theory 2023-07-03 v1 Optimization and Control

Abstract

We study the prophet inequality when the gambler has an access only to a single sample from each distribution. Rubinstein, Wang and Weinberg showed that an optimal guarantee of 1/2 can be achieved when the underlying matroid has rank 1, i.e. in the case of a single choice. We show that this guarantee can be achieved also in the case of a uniform matroid of rank 2 by a deterministic mechanism, and we show that this is best possible among deterministic mechanisms. We also conjecture that a straightforward generalization of our policy achieves the guarantee of 1/2 for all uniform matroids.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.17716,
  title  = {Single Sample Prophet Inequality for Uniform Matroids of Rank 2},
  author = {Kanstantsin Pashkovich and Alice Sayutina},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.17716},
  year   = {2023}
}