Related papers: Prophet Secretary: Surpassing the $1-1/e$ Barrier
We study a fundamental problem in optimization under uncertainty. There are $n$ boxes; each box $i$ contains a hidden reward $x_i$. Rewards are drawn i.i.d. from an unknown distribution $\mathcal{D}$. For each box $i$, we see $y_i$, an…
In the secretary problem of Cayley (1875) and Moser (1956), $n$ non-negative, independent, random variables with common distribution are sequentially presented to a decision maker who decides when to stop and collect the most recent…
This paper studies an online trading variant of the classical secretary problem, called secretary problem variant trading (SPVT), from the perspective of an intermediary who facilitates trade between a seller and $n$ buyers (collectively…
We study a twist on the classic secretary problem, which we term the secretary ranking problem: elements from an ordered set arrive in random order and instead of picking the maximum element, the algorithm is asked to assign a rank, or…
We initiate the study of centralized algorithms for welfare-maximizing allocation of goods to buyers subject to average-value constraints. We show that this problem is NP-hard to approximate beyond a factor of $\frac{e}{e-1}$, and provide a…
This paper studies Makespan Minimization in the secretary model. Formally, jobs, specified by their processing times, are presented in a uniformly random order. An online algorithm has to assign each job permanently and irrevocably to one…
The Bayesian persuasion paradigm of strategic communication models interaction between a privately-informed agent, called the sender, and an ignorant but rational agent, called the receiver. The goal is typically to design a (near-)optimal…
We consider the classical online bipartite matching problem in the probe-commit model. In this problem, when an online vertex arrives, its edges must be probed to determine if they exist, based on known edge probabilities. A probing…
We study secretary problems in settings with multiple agents. In the standard secretary problem, a sequence of arbitrary awards arrive online, in a random order, and a single decision maker makes an immediate and irrevocable decision…
We consider two variations of the classical secretary problem. * A variation of the returning secretary problem where each interviewee may appear a second time with a fixed probability p. The decision-maker observes interviewees…
This paper considers a finite horizon optimal stopping problem for a sequence of independent and identically distributed random variables, where the objective is to design stopping rules that attempt to select the random variable with the…
The prophet inequalities problem has received significant study over the past decades and has several applications such as to online auctions. In this paper, we study two variants of the i.i.d. prophet inequalities problem, namely the…
Consider a stream of $n$ random points (say, from the unit square) arriving one by one, where a player has to make an irreversible immediate decision for each arriving point whether to pick it. The player has to pick a single point, and the…
Consider a gambler and a prophet who observe a sequence of independent, non-negative numbers. The gambler sees the numbers one-by-one whereas the prophet sees the entire sequence at once. The goal of both is to decide on fractions of each…
In online sales, sellers usually offer each potential buyer a posted price in a take-it-or-leave fashion. Buyers can sometimes see posted prices faced by other buyers, and changing the price frequently could be considered unfair. The…
Suppose $X_1,X_2,...$ are i.i.d. nonnegative random variables with finite expectation, and for each $k$, $X_k$ is observed at the $k$-th arrival time $S_k$ of a Poisson process with unit rate which is independent of the sequence $\{X_k\}$.…
In this paper we consider the so-called Multi-returning secretary problem, a version of the Secretary problem in which each candidate has $m$ identical copies. The case $m=2$ has already been completely solved by several authors using…
We consider prophet inequalities in a setting where agents correspond to both elements in a matroid and vertices in a graph. A set of agents is feasible if they form both an independent set in the matroid and an independent set in the…
We consider the problem of hypothesis testing for discrete distributions. In the standard model, where we have sample access to an underlying distribution $p$, extensive research has established optimal bounds for uniformity testing,…
Due to numerous applications in retail and (online) advertising the problem of assortment selection has been widely studied under many combinations of discrete choice models and feasibility constraints. In many situations, however, an…