Related papers: Prophet Inequalities with Limited Information
The Prophet Inequality and Pandora's Box problems are fundamental stochastic problem with applications in Mechanism Design, Online Algorithms, Stochastic Optimization, Optimal Stopping, and Operations Research. A usual assumption in these…
We consider descending price auctions for selling $m$ units of a good to unit demand i.i.d. buyers where there is an exogenous bound of $k$ on the number of price levels the auction clock can take. The auctioneer's problem is to choose…
We consider a combinatorial auction setting where buyers have fractionally subadditive (XOS) valuations over the items and the seller's objective is to maximize the social welfare. A prophet inequality in this setting bounds the competitive…
In the single stock trading prophet problem formulated by Correa et al.\ (2023), an online algorithm observes a sequence of prices of a stock. At each step, the algorithm can either buy the stock by paying the current price if it doesn't…
Correa et al. [EC' 2023] introduced the following trading prophets problem. A trader observes a sequence of stochastic prices for a stock, each drawn from a known distribution, and at each time must decide whether to buy or sell.…
In the prophet secretary problem, $n$ values are drawn independently from known distributions, and presented in a uniformly random order. A decision-maker must accept or reject each value when it is presented, and may accept at most $k$…
Motivated by the growing interest in correlation-robust stochastic optimization, we investigate stochastic selection problems beyond independence. Specifically, we consider the instructive case of pairwise-independent priors and matroid…
This work introduces \emph{sharding} and \emph{Poissonization} as a unified framework for analyzing prophet inequalities. Sharding involves splitting a random variable into several independent random variables, shards, that collectively…
In this paper, we study $k$-unit single sample prophet inequalities. A seller has $k$ identical, indivisible items to sell. A sequence of buyers arrive one-by-one, with each buyer's private value for the item, $X_i$, revealed to the seller…
There are two major models of value uncertainty in the optimal stopping literature: the secretary model, which assumes no prior knowledge, and the prophet inequality model, which assumes full information about value distributions. In…
The prophet inequality is one of the cornerstone problems in optimal stopping theory and has become a crucial tool for designing sequential algorithms in Bayesian settings. In the i.i.d. $k$-selection prophet inequality problem, we…
Hill and Kertz studied the prophet inequality on iid distributions [The Annals of Probability 1982]. They proved a theoretical bound of $1-\frac{1}{e}$ on the approximation factor of their algorithm. They conjectured that the best…
We study the classic divide-and-choose method for equitably allocating divisible goods between two players who are rational, self-interested Bayesian agents. The players have additive values for the goods. The prior distributions on those…
This note records a common threshold/surplus decomposition for single-threshold stopping rules in the classical prophet inequality. The same decomposition is used to certify several deterministic thresholds, including the median, half-mean,…
In the classical optimal stopping problem, a player is given a sequence of random variables $X_1\ldots X_n$ with known distributions. After observing the realization of $X_i$, the player can either accept the observed reward from $X_i$ and…
In Bayesian online settings, every element has a value that is drawn from a known underlying distribution, which we refer to as the element's identity. The elements arrive sequentially. Upon the arrival of an element, its value is revealed,…
In "Recognizing the Maximum of a Sequence", Gilbert and Mosteller analyze a full information game where n measurements from an uniform distribution are drawn and a player (knowing n) must decide at each draw whether or not to choose that…
Numerous recent papers have studied the tension between thickening and clearing a market in (uncertain, online) long-time horizon Markovian settings. In particular, (Aouad and Sarita{\c{c}} EC'20, Collina et al. WINE'20, Kessel et al.…
In online combinatorial allocations/auctions, n bidders sequentially arrive, each with a combinatorial valuation (such as submodular/XOS) over subsets of m indivisible items. The aim is to immediately allocate a subset of the remaining…
In the online 2-bounded auction problem, we have a collection of items represented as nodes in a graph and bundles of size two represented by edges. Agents are presented sequentially, each with a random weight function over the bundles. The…