Related papers: Prophets and Secretaries with Overbooking
In modern sample-driven Prophet Inequality, an adversary chooses a sequence of $n$ items with values $v_1, v_2, \ldots, v_n$ to be presented to a decision maker (DM). The process follows in two phases. In the first phase (sampling phase),…
We study a "pen testing" problem, in which we are given $n$ pens with unknown amounts of ink $X_1, X_2, \ldots, X_n$, and we want to choose a pen with the maximum amount of remaining ink in it. The challenge is that we cannot access each…
We devise a general graph-theoretic framework for studying prophet inequalities. In this framework, an agent traverses a directed acyclic graph from a starting node $s$ to a target node $t$. Each edge has a value that is sampled from a…
The study of the prophet inequality problem in the limited information regime was initiated by Azar et al. [SODA'14] in the pursuit of prior-independent posted-price mechanisms. As they show, $O(1)$-competitive policies are achievable using…
Consider the problem: we are given $n$ boxes, labeled $\{1,2,\ldots, n\}$ by an adversary, each containing a single number chosen from an unknown distribution; these $n$ distributions are not necessarily identical. We are also given an…
The game of best choice, also known as the secretary problem, is a model for sequential decision making with many variations in the literature. Notably, the classical setup assumes that the sequence of candidate rankings is uniformly…
We introduce a new decomposition technique for random variables that maps a generic instance of the prophet inequalities problem to a new instance where all but a constant number of variables have a tractable structure that we refer to as…
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 study online secretary problems with returns in combinatorial packing domains with $n$ candidates that arrive sequentially over time in random order. The goal is to accept a feasible packing of candidates of maximum total value. In the…
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…
Prophet inequality concerns a basic optimal stopping problem and states that simple threshold stopping policies -- i.e., accepting the first reward larger than a certain threshold -- can achieve tight $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation to the…
In this paper, we investigate two variants of the secretary problem. In these variants, we are presented with a sequence of numbers $X_i$ that come from distributions $\mathcal{D}_i$, and that arrive in either random or adversarial order.…
We study threshold testing, an elementary probing model with the goal to choose a large value out of $n$ i.i.d. random variables. An algorithm can test each variable $X_i$ once for some threshold $t_i$, and the test returns binary feedback…
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…
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 initiate the study of the prophet inequality problem through the resource augmentation framework in scenarios when the values of the rewards are correlated. Our goal is to determine the number of additional rewards an online algorithm…
The I.I.D. Prophet Inequality is a fundamental problem where, given $n$ independent random variables $X_1,\dots,X_n$ drawn from a known distribution $\mathcal{D}$, one has to decide at every step $i$ whether to stop and accept $X_i$ or…
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,…
We study the success probability for a variant of the secretary problem, with noisy observations and multiple offline selection. Our formulation emulates, and is motivated by, problems involving noisy selection arising in the disciplines of…
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…