Related papers: The Best-or-Worst and the Postdoc problems
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\%,…
The game of best choice (or "secretary problem") is a model for making an irrevocable decision among a fixed number of candidate choices that are presented sequentially in random order, one at a time. Because the classically optimal…
We study a game between $N$ job applicants who incur a cost $c$ (relative to the job value) to reveal their type during interviews and an administrator who seeks to maximize the probability of hiring the best. We define a full learning…
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…
The prospect of finding love may be scary but the prospect of committing to a relationship for the rest of your life is almost certainly scary. The secretary problem is a parallel to romantic decision making where an individual decides when…
The classical analysis of online algorithms, due to its worst-case nature, can be quite pessimistic when the input instance at hand is far from worst-case. Often this is not an issue with machine learning approaches, which shine in…
We study online secretary problems with returns in combinatorial packing domains with $n$ candidates that arrive sequentially over time in random order. The goal is to accept a feasible packing of candidates of maximum total value. In the…
In learning-augmented online algorithms, predictions are usually valued for what they say: a value estimate, a solution, or an algorithmic recommendation. This paper shows that predictions can also be valuable solely due to their arrival…
We study various generalizations of the secretary problem with submodular objective functions. Generally, a set of requests is revealed step-by-step to an algorithm in random order. For each request, one option has to be selected so as to…
In this paper, we discuss a stochastic decision problem of optimally selecting the order in which to try $n$ opportunities that may yield an uncertain reward in the future. The motivation came out from pure curiosity, after an informal…
We revisit the problem of selecting an item from $n$ choices that appear before us in random sequential order so as to minimize the expected rank of the item selected. In particular, we examine the stopping rule where we reject the first…
In the classical secretary problem, $n$ ranked items arrive one by one, and each item's rank relative to its predecessors is noted. The observer must select or reject each item as it arrives, with the object of selecting the item of highest…
Optimal stopping theory is a powerful tool for analyzing scenarios such as online auctions in which we generally require optimizing an objective function over the space of stopping rules for an allocation process under uncertainty. Perhaps…
We consider a non-stationary variant of a sequential stochastic optimization problem, in which the underlying cost functions may change along the horizon. We propose a measure, termed variation budget, that controls the extent of said…
We study the success probability for a variant of the secretary problem, with noisy observations and multiple offline selection. Our formulation emulates, and is motivated by, problems involving noisy selection arising in the disciplines of…
Suppose a customer is faced with a sequence of fluctuating prices, such as for airfare or a product sold by a large online retailer. Given distributional information about what price they might face each day, how should they choose when to…
The classical secretary problem has been generalized over the years into several directions. In this paper we confine our interest to those generalizations which have to do with the more general problem of stopping on a last observation of…
In the online random-arrival model, an algorithm receives a sequence of n requests that arrive in a random order. The algorithm is expected to make an irrevocable decision with regard to each request based only on the observed history. We…
The J-choice K-best secretary problem, also known as the (J,K)-secretary problem, is a generalization of the classical secretary problem. An algorithm for the (J,K)-secretary problem is allowed to make J choices and the payoff to be…
The problem of computing near-optimal contracts in combinatorial settings has recently attracted significant interest in the computer science community. Previous work has provided a rich body of structural and algorithmic insights into this…