Related papers: Polymatroid Prophet Inequalities
We investigate the role of commitment in optimal stopping by studying all the variants between Prophet Inequality (PI) and Pandora's Box (PB). Both problems deal with a set of variables drawn from known distributions. In PI the gambler…
Can a probabilistic gambler get arbitrarily rich when all deterministic gamblers fail? We study this problem in the context of algorithmic randomness, introducing a new notion -- almost everywhere computable randomness. A binary sequence…
In this article, I will present a paradox whose purpose is to draw your attention to an important topic in finance, concerning the non-independence of the financial returns (non-ergodic hypothesis). In this paradox, we have two people…
Due to numerous applications in retail and (online) advertising the problem of assortment selection has been widely studied under many combinations of discrete choice models and feasibility constraints. In many situations, however, an…
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,…
Muchnik's paradox says that enumerable betting strategies are not always reducible to enumerable strategies whose bets are restricted to either even rounds or odd rounds. In other words, there are outcome sequences x where an effectively…
We consider a game in which a blindfolded player attempts to set $n$ counters lying on the vertices of a rotating regular $n$-gon table simultaneously to $0$. When the counters count$\pmod{m}$ we simplify the argument of Bar Yehuda, Etzion,…
In this article, we look at a hat-guessing game, in which each player must guess the color of their own hat while only seeing the hats of the other players. We focus on the case of two hat colors and a countably infinite number of players.…
Suppose a gambler starts with a fortune in (0,1) and wishes to attain a fortune of 1 by making a sequence of bets. Assume thay whenever the gambler stakes the amount s, the gambler's fortune increases by s with probability w and decreases…
Suppose a customer is faced with a sequence of fluctuating prices, such as for airfare or a product sold by a large online retailer. Given distributional information about what price they might face each day, how should they choose when to…
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…
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…
Optimal stopping theory is a powerful tool for analyzing scenarios such as online auctions in which we generally require optimizing an objective function over the space of stopping rules for an allocation process under uncertainty. Perhaps…
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 $k$…
We study a random game in which two players in turn play a fixed number of moves. For each move, there are two possible choices. To each possible outcome of the game we assign a winner in an i.i.d. fashion with a fixed parameter p. In the…
We consider Bayesian online selection problem of a matching in bipartite graphs, i.e., online weighted matching problem with edge arrivals where online algorithm knows distributions of weights, that corresponds to the intersection of two…
Prophet inequalities are performance guarantees for online algorithms (a.k.a. stopping rules) solving the following "hiring problem": a decision maker sequentially inspects candidates whose values are independent random numbers and is asked…
Football forecasting models traditionally rate teams on past match results, that is based on the number of goals scored. Goals, however, involve a high element of chance and thus past results often do not reflect the performances of the…
The study of the prophet inequality problem in the limited information regime was initiated by Azar et al. [SODA'14] in the pursuit of prior-independent posted-price mechanisms. As they show, $O(1)$-competitive policies are achievable using…
The classic model of computable randomness considers martingales that take real or rational values. Recent work by Bienvenu et al. (2012) and Teutsch (2014) shows that fundamental features of the classic model change when the martingales…