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We consider a feature-based personalized pricing problem in which the buyer is strategic: given the seller's pricing policy, the buyer can augment the features that they reveal to the seller to obtain a low price for the product. We model…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-19 Zhi Chen , Bradley Sturt , Weijun Xie

Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2009-04-17 Patrick Briest , Shuchi Chawla , Robert Kleinberg , S. Matthew Weinberg

We give a very general and simple framework to incorporate predictions on requests for online covering problems in a rigorous and black-box manner. Our framework turns any online algorithm with competitive ratio $\rho(k, \cdot)$ depending…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Afrouz Jabal Ameli , Laura Sanita , Moritz Venzin

Internet search companies sell advertisement slots based on users' search queries via an auction. Advertisers have to determine how to place bids on the keywords of their interest in order to maximize their return for a given budget: this…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2007-09-24 S. Muthukrishnan , Martin Pal , Zoya Svitkina

We study the online fair division problem, where indivisible goods arrive sequentially and must be allocated immediately and irrevocably. Prior work establishes strong impossibility results for approximating classic notions such as…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Davin Choo , Winston Fu , Derek Khu , Tzeh Yuan Neoh , Tze-Yang Poon , Nicholas Teh

We initiate a systematic study of utilizing predictions to improve over approximation guarantees of classic algorithms, without increasing the running time. We propose a systematic method for a wide class of optimization problems that ask…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Antonios Antoniadis , Marek Eliáš , Adam Polak , Moritz Venzin

Stochastic optimization is a widely used approach for optimization under uncertainty, where uncertain input parameters are modeled by random variables. Exact or approximation algorithms have been obtained for several fundamental problems in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Arpit Agarwal , Rohan Ghuge , Viswanath Nagarajan , Zhengjia Zhuo

We present new formulations of the stochastic electricity market clearing problem based on the principles of stochastic programming. Previous analyses have established that the canonical stochastic programming model effectively captures the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-05-11 Sakitha Ariyarathne , Harsha Gangammanavar

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

Buying and selling of data online has increased substantially over the last few years. Several frameworks have already been proposed that study query pricing in theory and practice. The key guiding principle in these works is the notion of…

Databases · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Shuchi Chawla , Shaleen Deep , Paraschos Koutris , Yifeng Teng

In the current work we introduce a novel estimation of distribution algorithm to tackle a hard combinatorial optimization problem, namely the single-machine scheduling problem, with uncertain delivery times. The majority of the existing…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2013-12-05 Boris Mitavskiy , Jun He

As machine learning applications grow increasingly ubiquitous and complex, they face an increasing set of requirements beyond accuracy. The prevalent approach to handle this challenge is to aggregate a weighted combination of requirement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Aneesh Barthakur , Luiz F. O. Chamon

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

Efficient and truthful mechanisms to price resources on remote servers/machines has been the subject of much work in recent years due to the importance of the cloud market. This paper considers revenue maximization in the online stochastic…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Shant Boodaghians , Federico Fusco , Stefano Leonardi , Yishay Mansour , Ruta Mehta

We study matroid prophet inequalities when distributions are unknown and accessible only through samples. While single-sample prophet inequalities for special matroids are known, no constant-factor competitive algorithm with even a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Hu Fu , Pinyan Lu , Zhihao Gavin Tang , Hongxun Wu , Jinzhao Wu , Qianfan Zhang

We introduce a novel framework of Prophet Inequalities for combinatorial valuation functions. For a (non-monotone) submodular objective function over an arbitrary matroid feasibility constraint, we give an $O(1)$-competitive algorithm. For…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-11-03 Aviad Rubinstein , Sahil Singla

Learning-augmented algorithms have received significant attention in recent years, particularly in the context of online optimization. Motivated by the high computational cost of generating predictions, a growing line of work studies the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yongho Shin , Phanu Vajanopath

In this paper, we propose a stochastic model to describe how search service providers charge client companies based on users' queries for the keywords related to these companies' ads by using certain advertisement assignment strategies. We…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2012-09-10 Bo Tan , R. Srikant

This paper addresses a novel data science problem, prescriptive price optimization, which derives the optimal price strategy to maximize future profit/revenue on the basis of massive predictive formulas produced by machine learning. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-25 Shinji Ito , Ryohei Fujimaki

Modeling and shaping how information spreads through a network is a major research topic in network analysis. While initially the focus has been mostly on efficiency, recently fairness criteria have been taken into account in this setting.…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Ruben Becker , Gianlorenzo D'Angelo , Sajjad Ghobadi