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Related papers: Prophet Secretary

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The rich literature on online Bayesian selection problems has long focused on so-called prophet inequalities, which compare the gain of an online algorithm to that of a "prophet" who knows the future. An equally-natural, though…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-08-19 Christos Papadimitriou , Tristan Pollner , Amin Saberi , David Wajc

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.…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-08-22 Pranav Nuti , Jan Vondrák

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-17 José Soto , Victor Verdugo

Prophet inequalities bound the expected reward that can be obtained in a stopping problem by the optimal reward of its corresponding off-line version. We propose a systematic technique for deriving prophet inequalities for stopping problems…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-10 Halil I. Bayrak , Mustafa Ç. Pınar , Rakesh Vohra

We study generalizations of the "Prophet Inequality" and "Secretary Problem", where the algorithm is restricted to an arbitrary downward-closed set system. For {0,1}-values, we give O(log n)-competitive algorithms for both problems. This is…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Aviad Rubinstein

Prophet inequalities are a central object of study in optimal stopping theory. A gambler is sent values in an online fashion, sampled from an instance of independent distributions, in an adversarial, random or selected order, depending on…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Giordano Giambartolomei , Frederik Mallmann-Trenn , Raimundo Saona

We extend the standard online worst-case model to accommodate past experience which is available to the online player in many practical scenarios. We do this by revealing a random sample of the adversarial input to the online player ahead…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-07-12 Haim Kaplan , David Naori , Danny Raz

We study variants of the secretary problem, where $N$, the number of candidates, is a random variable, and the decision maker wants to maximize the probability of success -- picking the largest number among the $N$ candidates -- using only…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Junhui Zhang , Patrick Jaillet

In a classical online decision problem, a decision-maker who is trying to maximize her value inspects a sequence of arriving items to learn their values (drawn from known distributions), and decides when to stop the process by taking the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Nicole Immorlica , Sahil Singla , Bo Waggoner

We consider the online problem in which an intermediary trades identical items with a sequence of n buyers and n sellers, each of unit demand. We assume that the values of the traders are selected by an adversary and the sequence is…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Elias Koutsoupias , Philip Lazos

We present a general framework for stochastic online maximization problems with combinatorial feasibility constraints. The framework establishes prophet inequalities by constructing price-based online approximation algorithms, a natural…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-07-11 Paul Dütting , Michal Feldman , Thomas Kesselheim , Brendan Lucier

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-11-17 José Correa , Andrés Cristi , Laurent Feuilloley , Tim Oosterwijk , Alexandros Tsigonias-Dimitriadis

We solve the secretary problem in the case that the ranked items arrive in a statistically biased order rather than in uniformly random order. The bias is given by a Mallows distribution with parameter $q\in(0,1)$, so that higher ranked…

Probability · Mathematics 2021-12-02 Ross G. Pinsky

We consider the problem of selling perishable items to a stream of buyers in order to maximize social welfare. A seller starts with a set of identical items, and each arriving buyer wants any one item, and has a valuation drawn i.i.d. from…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-01-23 Reza Alijani , Siddhartha Banerjee , Sreenivas Gollapudi , Kamesh Munagala , Kangning Wang

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Sarthak Agrawal , Sanjeev Saxena

We study a learning-augmented variant of the secretary problem, recently introduced by Fujii and Yoshida (2023), in which the decision-maker has access to machine-learned predictions of candidate values. The central challenge is to balance…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Helia Karisani , Mohammadreza Daneshvaramoli , Hedyeh Beyhaghi , Mohammad Hajiesmaili , Cameron Musco

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-03-07 Xujun Liu , Olgica Milenkovic , George V. Moustakides

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-11-24 Constantine Caramanis , Matthew Faw , Orestis Papadigenopoulos , Emmanouil Pountourakis

Online advertising has motivated interest in online selection problems. Displaying ads to the right users benefits both the platform (e.g., via pay-per-click) and the advertisers (by increasing their reach). In practice, not all users click…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Sebastian Perez-Salazar , Mohit Singh , Alejandro Toriello

The prophet inequalities problem has received significant study over the past decades and has several applications such as to online auctions. In this paper, we study two variants of the i.i.d. prophet inequalities problem, namely the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-12-01 William Marshall , Nolan Miranda , Albert Zuo