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In the paper the generalisation of the well known "secretary problem" is considered. The aim of the paper is to give a generalised model in such a way that the chosen set of the possible best $k$ elements have to be independent of all…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Wojciech Kordecki

In classical secretary problems, a sequence of $n$ elements arrive in a uniformly random order, and we want to choose a single item, or a set of size $K$. The random order model allows us to escape from the strong lower bounds for the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-12-02 Domagoj Bradac , Anupam Gupta , Sahil Singla , Goran Zuzic

Contention resolution schemes have proven to be a useful and unifying abstraction for a variety of constrained optimization problems, in both offline and online arrival models. Much of prior work restricts attention to product distributions…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-04-30 Shaddin Dughmi

In the Online Machine Covering problem jobs, defined by their sizes, arrive one by one and have to be assigned to $m$ parallel and identical machines, with the goal of maximizing the load of the least-loaded machine. In this work, we study…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Susanne Albers , Waldo Gálvez , Maximilian Janke

Classical problems of sorting and searching assume an underlying linear ordering of the objects being compared. In this paper, we study a more general setting, in which some pairs of objects are incomparable. This generalization is relevant…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2007-07-12 Constantinos Daskalakis , Richard M. Karp , Elchanan Mossel , Samantha Riesenfeld , Elad Verbin

As a famous result, the ``37\% Law'' for Secretary Problem has widely influenced peoples' perception on online decision strategies about choice. However, using this strategy, too many attractive candidates may be rejected in the first 37\%,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-07-15 Zishuo Zhao

The secretary problem is probably the purest model of decision making under uncertainty. In this paper we ask which advice can we give the algorithm to improve its success probability? We propose a general model that unifies a broad range…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-11-16 Paul Dütting , Silvio Lattanzi , Renato Paes Leme , Sergei Vassilvitskii

In submodular $k$-secretary problem, the goal is to select $k$ items in a randomly ordered input so as to maximize the expected value of a given monotone submodular function on the set of selected items. In this paper, we introduce a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Shipra Agrawal , Mohammad Shadravan , Cliff Stein

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 consider the matroid prophet inequality problem. This problem has been extensively studied in the case of adaptive mechanisms. In particular, there is a tight $2$-competitive mechanism for all matroids. However, it is not known what…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Kanstantsin Pashkovich , Alice Sayutina

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 introduce a variant of the classic prophet inequality, called \emph{residual prophet inequality} (RPI). In the RPI problem, we consider a finite sequence of $n$ nonnegative independent random values with known distributions, and a known…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Jose Correa , Sebastian Perez-Salazar , Dana Pizarro , Bruno Ziliotto

We analyze the secretary problem in the case that the $n$ ranked items arrive not in uniformly random order but rather according to a certain type of Luce distribution or according to a Mallows distribution on the set $S_n$ of permutations…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-12 Ross G. Pinsky

The set equality problem is to decide whether two sets $A$ and $B$ are equal or disjoint, under the promise that one of these is the case. Some other problems, like the Graph Isomorphism problem, is solvable by reduction to the set quality…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Gatis Midrijanis

In this paper we revisit the basic variant of the classical secretary problem. We propose a new approach in which we separate between an agent that evaluates the secretary performance and one that has to make the hiring decision. The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-05-27 Niklas Hahn , Martin Hoefer , Rann Smorodinsky

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Surbhi Rajput , Ashish Chiplunkar , Rohit Vaish

A central object in optimal stopping theory is the single-choice prophet inequality for independent, identically distributed random variables: Given a sequence of random variables $X_1,\dots,X_n$ drawn independently from a distribution $F$,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-04-08 José R. Correa , Paul Dütting , Felix Fischer , Kevin Schewior

Since Harrow, Hassidim, and Lloyd (2009) showed that a system of linear equations with $N$ variables and condition number $\kappa$ can be solved on a quantum computer in $\operatorname{poly}(\log(N), \kappa)$ time, exponentially faster than…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-07-16 Qisheng Wang , Zhicheng Zhang

We study the approximation of halfspaces $h:\{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}$ in the infinity norm by polynomials and rational functions of any given degree. Our main result is an explicit construction of the "hardest" halfspace, for which we prove…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2019-02-06 Alexander A. Sherstov

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…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Kimmo Eriksson , Jonas Sjostrand , Pontus Strimling