Related papers: The Best-or-Worst and the Postdoc problems
This paper considers a variation of the full-information secretary problem where the random variables to be observed are independent but not necessary identically distributed. The main result is a sharp lower bound for the optimal win…
Selecting a set of alternatives based on the preferences of agents is an important problem in committee selection and beyond. Among the various criteria put forth for the desirability of a committee, Pareto optimality is a minimal and…
This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…
Suppose that $n$ items arrive online in random order and the goal is to select $k$ of them such that the expected sum of the selected items is maximized. The decision for any item is irrevocable and must be made on arrival without knowing…
Consider the following Stochastic Score Classification Problem. A doctor is assessing a patient's risk of developing a certain disease, and can perform $n$ tests on the patient. Each test has a binary outcome, positive or negative. A…
The random-order or secretary model is one of the most popular beyond-worst case model for online algorithms. While it avoids the pessimism of the traditional adversarial model, in practice we cannot expect the input to be presented in…
We consider the online problem in which an intermediary trades identical items with a sequence of n buyers and n sellers, each of unit demand. We assume that the values of the traders are selected by an adversary and the sequence is…
Many binary classification problems minimize misclassification above (or below) a threshold. We show that instances of ranking problems, accuracy at the top or hypothesis testing may be written in this form. We propose a general framework…
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 show NP-completeness for several planar variants of the monotone satisfiability problem with bounded variable appearances. With one exception the presented variants have an associated bipartite graph where the vertex degree is bounded by…
We study a two-period moral hazard problem; there are two agents, with action sets that are unknown to the principal. The principal contracts with each agent sequentially, and seeks to maximize the worst-case discounted sum of payoffs,…
We study a bilateral trade problem where a principal has private information that is revealed with delay, such as a seller who does not yet know her production cost. Postponing the contracting process incurs a costly delay, while early…
In robust decision-making under non-Bayesian uncertainty, different robust optimization criteria, such as maximin performance, minimax regret, and maximin ratio, have been proposed. In many problems, all three criteria are well-motivated…
We introduce and investigate properties of a variant of the semi-discrete optimal transport problem. In this problem, one is given an absolutely continuous source measure and cost function, along with a finite set which will be the support…
Studying complexity of various bribery problems has been one of the main research focus in computational social choice. In all the models of bribery studied so far, the briber has to pay every voter some amount of money depending on what…
We study the computational complexity of bribery in parliamentary voting, in settings where the briber is (also) interested in the success of an entire set of political parties - a ``coalition'' - rather than an individual party. We…
This paper introduces the \emph{serial-parallel decision problem}. Consider an online scheduler that receives a series of tasks, where each task has both a parallel and a serial implementation. The parallel implementation has the advantage…
We model the joint distribution of choice probabilities and decision times in binary choice tasks as the solution to a problem of optimal sequential sampling, where the agent is uncertain of the utility of each action and pays a constant…
We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…
The prophet and secretary problems demonstrate online scenarios involving the optimal stopping theory. In a typical prophet or secretary problem, selection decisions are assumed to be immediate and irrevocable. However, many online settings…