English
Related papers

Related papers: Prophet Secretary: Surpassing the $1-1/e$ Barrier

200 papers

We study a class of Bayesian online selection problems with matroid constraints. Consider a vendor who has several items to sell, with the set of sold items being subject to some structural constraints, e.g., the set of sold items should be…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Ian DeHaan , Kanstantsin Pashkovich

A decisionmaker faces $n$ alternatives, each of which represents a potential reward. After investing costly resources into investigating the alternatives, the decisionmaker may select one, or more generally a feasible subset, and obtain the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Robin Bowers , Elias Lindgren , Bo Waggoner

We consider the problem of one-way communication when the recipient does not know exactly the distribution that the messages are drawn from, but has a "prior" distribution that is known to be close to the source distribution, a problem…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-11-26 Mark Braverman , Brendan Juba

In a matroid secretary problem, one is presented with a sequence of objects of various weights in a random order, and must choose irrevocably to accept or reject each item. There is a further constraint that the set of items selected must…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-01-22 David Harris , Manish Purohit

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Antonios Antoniadis , Themis Gouleakis , Pieter Kleer , Pavel Kolev

Best-Fit is one of the most prominent and practically used algorithms for the bin packing problem, where a set of items with associated sizes needs to be packed in the minimum number of unit-capacity bins. Kenyon [SODA '96] studied online…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-01-10 Anish Hebbar , Arindam Khan , K. V. N. Sreenivas

We consider a double secretary problem which contains $2n$ applicants of $n$ different qualities, two of each quality. As in the classical secretary problem (CSP), the applicants are interviewed sequentially in a random order by a manager…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-11-18 Shoou-Ren Hsiau , Yi-Shen Lin

The seminar assignment problem is a variant of the generalized assignment problem in which items have unit size and the amount of space allowed in each bin is restricted to an arbitrary set of values. The problem has been shown to be…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-10-18 Amotz Bar-Noy , George Rabanca

The decision-maker (DM) sequentially evaluates up to N of different, rankable options. DM must select exactly the best one at the moment of its appearance. In the process of searching, DM finds out with each applicant whether she is the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-23 Krzysztof J. Szajowski

The secretary problem became one of the most prominent online selection problems due to its numerous applications in online mechanism design. The task is to select a maximum weight subset of elements subject to given constraints, where…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-04-11 Moran Feldman , Ola Svensson , Rico Zenklusen

We consider a variant of the secretary problem in which the candidates state their expected salary at the interview, which we assume is in accordance with their qualifications. The goal is for the employer to hire the best or the worst…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-03-22 L. Bayon , J. Grau , A. M. Oller-Marcen , M. Ruiz , P. M. Suarez

We present prior robust algorithms for a large class of resource allocation problems where requests arrive one-by-one (online), drawn independently from an unknown distribution at every step. We design a single algorithm that, for every…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-03-12 Nikhil R. Devanur , Kamal Jain , Balasubramanian Sivan , Christopher A. Wilkens

We show that the matroid secretary problem is equivalent to correlated contention resolution in the online random-order model. Specifically, the matroid secretary conjecture is true if and only if every matroid admits an online random-order…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Shaddin Dughmi

In the subject of optimal stopping, the classical secretary problem is concerned with optimally selecting the best of $n$ candidates when their relative ranks are observed sequentially. This problem has been extended to optimally selecting…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-12-06 Yi-Shen Lin , Shoou-Ren Hsiau , Yi-Ching Yao

The \emph{Temp Secretary Problem} was recently introduced by Fiat et al. It is a generalization of the Secretary Problem, in which commitments are temporary for a fixed duration. We present a simple online algorithm with improved…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-06-23 Thomas Kesselheim , Andreas Tönnis

Motivated by the growing interest in correlation-robust stochastic optimization, we investigate stochastic selection problems beyond independence. Specifically, we consider the instructive case of pairwise-independent priors and matroid…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Shaddin Dughmi , Yusuf Hakan Kalayci , Neel Patel

The fundamental assignment problem is in search of welfare maximization mechanisms to allocate items to agents when the private preferences over indivisible items are provided by self-interested agents. The mainstream mechanism…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Yansong Gao , Jie Zhang

Numerous recent papers have studied the tension between thickening and clearing a market in (uncertain, online) long-time horizon Markovian settings. In particular, (Aouad and Sarita{\c{c}} EC'20, Collina et al. WINE'20, Kessel et al.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Neel Patel , David Wajc

There is a rising interest for studying the online benchmark as an alternative of the classical offline benchmark in online stochastic settings. Ezra, Feldman, Gravin, and Tang (SODA 2023) introduced the notion of order-competitive ratio,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Liyan Chen , Nuozhou Sun , Zhihao Gavin Tang

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…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-12-12 Pieter C. Allaart , Jose A. Islas