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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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-02-08 Roberto Brera , Feng Fu

Whereas there are simple algorithms that are proven to be optimal for the Classical and the Multiple Choice Secretary Problem, the Matroid Secretary Problem is less thoroughly understood. This paper proposes the generalization of some…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Simon Park

We study the prophet secretary problem, a well-studied variant of the classic prophet inequality, where values are drawn from independent known distributions but arrive in uniformly random order. Upon seeing a value at each step, the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Paul Dütting , Evangelia Gergatsouli , Rojin Rezvan , Yifeng Teng , Alexandros Tsigonias-Dimitriadis

In a matroid secretary problem, one is presented with a sequence of objects of various weights in a random order, and must choose irrevocably to accept or reject each item. There is a further constraint that the set of items selected must…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-01-22 David Harris , Manish Purohit

This paper studies an online trading variant of the classical secretary problem, called secretary problem variant trading (SPVT), from the perspective of an intermediary who facilitates trade between a seller and $n$ buyers (collectively…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-20 Xujin Chen , Xiaodong Hu , Changjun Wang , Yuchun Xiong , Qingjie Ye

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

The classical secretary problem investigates the question of how to hire the best secretary from $n$ candidates who come in a uniformly random order. In this work we investigate a parallel generalizations of this problem introduced by…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-09-18 Xiaoming Sun , Jia Zhang , Jialin Zhang

Motivated by hiring pipelines, we study three selection and ordering problems in which applicants for a finite set of positions must be interviewed or sent offers. There is a finite time budget for interviewing/sending offers, and every…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Boris Epstein , Will Ma

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-02-10 Thomas Kesselheim , Robert Kleinberg , Rad Niazadeh

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…

Probability · Mathematics 2010-09-06 Chris Dietz , Dinard van der Laan , Ad Ridder

We revisit the knapsack-secretary problem (Babaioff et al.; APPROX 2007), a generalization of the classic secretary problem in which items have different sizes and multiple items may be selected if their total size does not exceed the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-08-11 Andreas Abels , Leon Ladewig , Kevin Schewior , Moritz Stinzendörfer

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 $k$…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-06-09 Nick Arnosti , Will Ma

We examine several online matching problems, with applications to Internet advertising reservation systems. Consider an edge-weighted bipartite graph G, with partite sets L, R. We develop an 8-competitive algorithm for the following…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2008-07-09 Nitish Korula , Martin Pal

The secretary problem became one of the most prominent online selection problems due to its numerous applications in online mechanism design. The task is to select a maximum weight subset of elements subject to given constraints, where…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-04-11 Moran Feldman , Ola Svensson , Rico Zenklusen

We consider ordinal online problems, i.e., tasks that only require pairwise comparisons between elements of the input. A classic example is the secretary problem and the game of googol, as well as its multiple combinatorial extensions such…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Nick Gravin , Enze Sun , Zhihao Gavin Tang

One of the classic problems in online decision-making is the *secretary problem* where to goal is to maximize the probability of choosing the largest number from a randomly ordered sequence. A natural extension allows selecting multiple…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Kiarash Banihashem , MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi , Dariusz R. Kowalski , Piotr Krysta , Danny Mittal , Jan Olkowski

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

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

The game of best choice, also known as the secretary problem, is a model for sequential decision making with many variations in the literature. Notably, the classical setup assumes that the sequence of candidate rankings is uniformly…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-03-13 Madeline Crews , Brant Jones , Kaitlyn Myers , Laura Taalman , Michael Urbanski , Breeann Wilson

This paper introduces a heuristic framework for the Best Secretary Problem, where one item must be selected using rank information only. We develop five data-responsive rules extending classical fixed-cutoff methods: an expected-record…

Applications · Statistics 2025-11-14 Eugene Seong