Related papers: Secretary Problem with quality-based payoff
In the classical principal-agent problem, a principal must design a contract to incentivize an agent to perform an action on behalf of the principal. We study the classical principal-agent problem in a setting where the agent can be of one…
Commercial entries, such as hotels, are ranked according to score by a search engine or recommendation system, and the score of each can be improved upon by making a targeted investment, e.g., advertising. We study the problem of how a…
What is the optimal order in which a researcher should submit their papers to journals of differing quality? I analyze a sequential search model without recall where the researcher's expected value from journal submission depends on the…
We study a setting in which a principal selects an agent to execute a collection of tasks according to a specified priority sequence. Agents, however, have their own individual priority sequences according to which they wish to execute the…
A decision maker repeatedly chooses one of a finite set of actions. In each period, the decision maker's payoff depends on fixed basic payoff of the chosen action and the frequency with which the action has been chosen in the past. We…
Synthesis of bulletproof strategies in imperfect information scenarios is a notoriously hard problem. In this paper, we suggest that it is sometimes a viable alternative to aim at "reasonably good" strategies instead. This makes sense not…
The Assignment problem is a fundamental and well-studied problem in the intersection of Social Choice, Computational Economics and Discrete Allocation. In the Assignment problem, a group of agents expresses preferences over a set of items,…
This paper answers a long-standing open question concerning the $1/e$-strategy for the problem of best choice. $N$ candidates for a job arrive at times independently uniformly distributed in $[0,1]$. The interviewer knows how each candidate…
We consider a moral hazard problem with multiple principals in a continuous-time model. The agent can only work exclusively for one principal at a given time, so faces an optimal switching problem. Using a randomized formulation, we manage…
This paper views hiring as a contextual bandit problem: to find the best workers over time, firms must balance exploitation (selecting from groups with proven track records) with exploration (selecting from under-represented groups to learn…
There is a growing body of work on sorting and selection in models other than the unit-cost comparison model. This work is the first treatment of a natural stochastic variant of the problem where the cost of comparing two elements is a…
To better understand discriminations and the effect of affirmative actions in selection problems (e.g., college admission or hiring), a recent line of research proposed a model based on differential variance. This model assumes that the…
Suppose we are given integer $k \leq n$ and $n$ boxes labeled $1,\ldots, n$ by an adversary, each containing a number chosen from an unknown distribution. We have to choose an order to sequentially open these boxes, and each time we open…
The optimization of mixed-variable problems remains a significant challenge. We propose an extension of the policy-based optimization method that handles mixed-variables problems in a natural way, through a simple policy combination. This…
The stable marriage problem and its extensions have been extensively studied, with much of the work in the literature assuming that agents fully know their own preferences over alternatives. This assumption however is not always practical…
Previous work on the competitive retrieval setting focused on a single-query setting: document authors manipulate their documents so as to improve their future ranking for a given query. We study a competitive setting where authors opt to…
In this paper we present the Warm-starting Dynamic Thresholding algorithm, developed using dynamic programming, for a variant of the standard online selection problem. The problem allows job positions to be either free or already occupied…
We explore the resolution of claims problems with history. At a given period of time, a group of agents holds claims over an insufficient endowment, as they did in previous periods. The solution to the present-period problem might be…
I study the optimal design of ratings to motivate agent investment in quality when transfers are unavailable. The principal designs a rating scheme that maps the agent's quality to a (possibly stochastic) score. The agent has private…
For many online problems, it is known that the uniform arrival order enables the design of algorithms with much better performance guarantees than under worst-case. The quintessential example is the secretary problem. If the sequence of…