Related papers: The Price of Information in Combinatorial Optimiza…
We introduce the problem of finding a spanning tree along with a partition of the tree edges into fewest number of feasible sets, where constraints on the edges define feasibility. The motivation comes from wireless networking, where we…
Spanning trees are an important primitive in many data analysis tasks, when a data set needs to be summarized in terms of its "skeleton", or when a tree-shaped graph over all observations is required for downstream processing. Popular…
How can a system designer exploit system-level knowledge to derive incentives to optimally influence social behavior? The literature on network routing contains many results studying the application of monetary tolls to influence behavior…
In the online Steiner tree problem, the input is a set of vertices that appear one-by-one, and we have to maintain a Steiner tree on the current set of vertices. The cost of the tree is the total length of edges in the tree, and we want…
There is a growing body of work on sorting and selection in models other than the unit-cost comparison model. This work is the first treatment of a natural stochastic variant of the problem where the cost of comparing two elements is a…
A decision maker is choosing between an active action (e.g., purchase a house, invest certain stock) and a passive action. The payoff of the active action depends on the buyer's private type and also an unknown state of nature. An…
This paper investigates and bounds the expected solution quality of combinatorial optimization problems when feasible solutions are chosen at random. Loose general bounds are discovered, as well as families of combinatorial optimization…
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…
In this paper we consider spatial networks that realize a balance between an infrastructure cost (the cost of wire needed to connect the network in space) and communication efficiency, measured by average shortest pathlength. A global…
An agent acquires a costly flexible signal before making a decision. We explore to what degree knowledge of the agent's information costs helps predict her behavior. We establish an impossibility result: learning costs alone generate no…
Designing fare systems for public transportation networks is a challenging task. A popular approach is to partition the network into fare zones (``zoning'') and fix journey prices depending on the number of traversed zones (``pricing''). In…
We introduce and study the combinatorial optimization problem with interaction costs (COPIC). COPIC is the problem of finding two combinatorial structures, one from each of two given families, such that the sum of their independent linear…
The Stackelberg Minimum Spanning Tree Game is a two-level combinatorial pricing problem played on a graph representing a network. Its edges are colored either red or blue, and the red edges have a given fixed cost, representing the…
We consider the Steiner tree problem on graphs where we are given a set of nodes and the goal is to find a tree sub-graph of minimum weight that contains all nodes in the given set, potentially including additional nodes. This is a…
Campaigners are increasingly using online social networking platforms for promoting products, ideas and information. A popular method of promoting a product or even an idea is incentivizing individuals to evangelize the idea vigorously by…
We consider the minimum spanning tree problem in a setting where the edge weights are stochastic from unknown distributions, and the only available information is a single sample of each edge's weight distribution. In this setting, we…
Price determination is a central research topic of revenue management in marketing. The important aspect in pricing is controlling the stochastic behavior of demand, and the previous studies have tackled price optimization problems with…
We study information elicitation in cost-function-based combinatorial prediction markets when the market maker's utility for information decreases over time. In the sudden revelation setting, it is known that some piece of information will…
We study the {\em min-cost chain-constrained spanning-tree} (abbreviated \mcst) problem: find a min-cost spanning tree in a graph subject to degree constraints on a nested family of node sets. We devise the {\em first} polytime algorithm…
Submodular functions are an important class of functions in combinatorial optimization which satisfy the natural properties of decreasing marginal costs. The study of these functions has led to strong structural properties with applications…