Related papers: The Best-or-Worst and the Postdoc problems
In the Prophet Secretary problem, samples from a known set of probability distributions arrive one by one in a uniformly random order, and an algorithm must irrevocably pick one of the samples as soon as it arrives. The goal is to maximize…
Routing and scheduling problems are fundamental problems in combinatorial optimization, and also have many applications. Most variations of these problems are NP-Hard, so we need to use heuristics to solve these problems on large instances,…
We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the…
We study a decision-maker's problem of finding optimal monetary incentive schemes for retention when faced with agents whose participation decisions (stochastically) depend on the incentive they receive. Our focus is on policies constrained…
We study the consequences of the equivalence between the least gradient problem and a boundary-to-boundary optimal transport problem in two dimensions. We extend the relationship between the two problems to their respective dual problems,…
Top-K queries are an established heuristic in information retrieval. This paper presents an approach for optimal tiered storage allocation under stream processing workloads using this heuristic: those requiring the analysis of only the…
We introduce the framework of qualitative optimization problems (or, simply, optimization problems) to represent preference theories. The formalism uses separate modules to describe the space of outcomes to be compared (the generator) and…
The hiring problem is studied for general strategies based only on the relative ranking of the candidates; this includes some well known strategies studied before such as hiring above the median. We give general limit theorems for the…
We study the two-sided stable matching problem with one-sided uncertainty for two sets of agents A and B, with equal cardinality. Initially, the preference lists of the agents in A are given but the preferences of the agents in B are…
The Possible-Winner problem asks, given an election where the voters' preferences over the set of candidates is partially specified, whether a distinguished candidate can become a winner. In this work, we consider the computational…
In this paper, we study twelve stochastic input models for online problems and reveal the relationships among the competitive ratios for the models. The competitive ratio is defined as the worst ratio between the expected optimal value and…
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…
This note considers a variation of the full-information secretary problem where the random variables to be observed are independent and identically distributed. Consider $X_1,\dots,X_n$ to be an independent sequence of random variables, let…
In the best choice problem with random arrivals, an unknown number $n$ of rankable items arrive at times sampled from the uniform distribution. As is well known, a real-time player can ensure stopping at the overall best item with…
There are many economic contexts where the productivity and welfare performance of institutions and policies depend on who matches with whom. Examples include caseworkers and job seekers in job search assistance programs, medical doctors…
Usually a voting rule requires agents to give their preferences as linear orders. However, in some cases it is impractical for an agent to give a linear order over all the alternatives. It has been suggested to let agents submit partial…
We consider stopping problems in which a decision maker (DM) faces an unknown state of nature and decides sequentially whether to stop and take an irreversible action; pay a fee and obtain additional information; or wait without acquiring…
The most well-known conjecture in the context of matroid secretary problems claims the existence of a constant-factor approximation applicable to any matroid. Whereas this conjecture remains open, modified forms of it were shown to be true,…
The task of learning to pick a single preferred example out a finite set of examples, an "optimal choice problem", is a supervised machine learning problem with complex, structured input. Problems of optimal choice emerge often in various…
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…