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The classical secretary problem has been generalized over the years into several directions. In this paper we confine our interest to those generalizations which have to do with the more general problem of stopping on a last observation of…
In the subject of optimal stopping, the classical secretary problem is concerned with optimally selecting the best of $n$ candidates when their relative ranks are observed sequentially. This problem has been extended to optimally selecting…
We consider a double secretary problem which contains $2n$ applicants of $n$ different qualities, two of each quality. As in the classical secretary problem (CSP), the applicants are interviewed sequentially in a random order by a manager…
Candidates arrive sequentially for an interview process which results in them being ranked relative to their predecessors. Based on the ranks available at each time, one must develop a decision mechanism that selects or dismisses the…
We revisit the problem of selecting an item from $n$ choices that appear before us in random sequential order so as to minimize the expected rank of the item selected. In particular, we examine the stopping rule where we reject the first…
We consider two variations of the classical secretary problem. * A variation of the returning secretary problem where each interviewee may appear a second time with a fixed probability p. The decision-maker observes interviewees…
We take a unifying approach to single selection optimal stopping problems with random arrival order and independent sampling of items. In the problem we consider, a decision maker (DM) initially gets to sample each of $N$ items…
In the secretary problem we are faced with an online sequence of elements with values. Upon seeing an element we have to make an irrevocable take-it-or-leave-it decision. The goal is to maximize the probability of picking the element of…
In this paper, we present a novel method for computing the asymptotic values of both the optimal threshold, and the probability of success in sequences of optimal stopping problems. This method, based on the resolution of a first-order…
The secretary problem has been a focus of extensive study with a variety of extensions that offer useful insights into the theory of optimal stopping. The original solution is to set one stopping threshold that gives rise to an immediately…
A version of the classical secretary problem is studied, in which one is interested in selecting one of the b best out of a group of n differently ranked persons who are presented one by one in a random order. It is assumed that b is a…
This paper considers a variation of the full-information secretary problem where the random variables to be observed are independent but not necessary identically distributed. The main result is a sharp lower bound for the optimal win…
The Secretary problem is a classical sequential decision-making question that can be succinctly described as follows: a set of rank-ordered applicants are interviewed sequentially for a single position. Once an applicant is interviewed, an…
For $2\le k\in\mathbb{N}$, consider the following adaptation of the classical secretary problem. There are $k$ items at each of $n$ linearly ordered ranks. The $kn$ items are revealed, one item at a time, in a uniformly random order, to an…
In the "secretary problem", well-known in the theory of optimal stopping, an employer is about to interview a maximum of N secretaries about which she has no prior information. Chow et al. proved that with an optimal strategy the expected…
We study a generalization of the secretary problem, where decisions do not have to be made immediately upon candidates' arrivals. After arriving, each candidate stays in the system for some (random) amount of time and then leaves, whereupon…
In this paper, we investigate two variants of the secretary problem. In these variants, we are presented with a sequence of numbers $X_i$ that come from distributions $\mathcal{D}_i$, and that arrive in either random or adversarial order.…
We present a new variant of the secretary problem. Let $A$ be a totally ordered set of $n$ \emph{applicants}. Given $P\subseteq A$ and $x\in A$, let $rr(P,x)=\vert\{z\in P \mid z\leq x\}\vert\mbox{ }$ be the \emph{relative rank of} $x$…
We consider two variants of the secretary problem, the\emph{ Best-or-Worst} and the \emph{Postdoc} problems, which are closely related. First, we prove that both variants, in their standard form with binary payoff 1 or 0, share the same…
We define and study a new variant of the secretary problem. Whereas in the classic setting multiple secretaries compete for a single position, we study the case where the secretaries arrive one at a time and are assigned, in an on-line…