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Related papers: Prophets and Secretaries with Overbooking

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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

We study a variation of the game of best choice (also known as the secretary problem or game of googol) under an additional assumption that the ranks of interview candidates are restricted using permutation pattern-avoidance. We describe…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-04-24 Aaron Fowlkes , Brant Jones

The setting of the classic prophet inequality is as follows: a gambler is shown the probability distributions of $n$ independent, non-negative random variables with finite expectations. In their indexed order, a value is drawn from each…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-12-31 Jack Wang

Due to their numerous applications, in particular in Mechanism Design, Prophet Inequalities have experienced a surge of interest. They describe competitive ratios for basic stopping time problems where random variables get revealed…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Moran Feldman , Ola Svensson , Rico Zenklusen

There are many settings in which a principal performs a task by delegating it to an agent, who searches over possible solutions and proposes one to the principal. This describes many aspects of the workflow within organizations, as well as…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-06-20 Jon Kleinberg , Robert Kleinberg

The NP-hard problem of task scheduling with communication delays (P|prec,c_{ij}|C_{\mathrm{max}}) is often tackled using approximate methods, but guarantees on the quality of these heuristic solutions are hard to come by. Optimal schedules…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Michael Orr , Oliver Sinnen

This paper introduces a heuristic framework for the Best Secretary Problem, where one item must be selected using rank information only. We develop five data-responsive rules extending classical fixed-cutoff methods: an expected-record…

Applications · Statistics 2025-11-14 Eugene Seong

We consider the secretary problem through the lens of learning-augmented algorithms. As it is known that the best possible expected competitive ratio is $1/e$ in the classic setting without predictions, a natural goal is to design…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Davin Choo , Chun Kai Ling

In this paper, we study $k$-unit single sample prophet inequalities. A seller has $k$ identical, indivisible items to sell. A sequence of buyers arrive one-by-one, with each buyer's private value for the item, $X_i$, revealed to the seller…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Pranav Nuti , Peter Westbrook

We consider the online problem in which an intermediary trades identical items with a sequence of n buyers and n sellers, each of unit demand. We assume that the values of the traders are selected by an adversary and the sequence is…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Elias Koutsoupias , Philip Lazos

Constrained submodular maximization problems have long been studied, with near-optimal results known under a variety of constraints when the submodular function is monotone. The case of non-monotone submodular maximization is less…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2010-10-07 Anupam Gupta , Aaron Roth , Grant Schoenebeck , Kunal Talwar

In a delegation problem, a principal P with commitment power tries to pick one out of $n$ options. Each option is drawn independently from a known distribution. Instead of inspecting the options herself, P delegates the information…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-03-03 Pirmin Braun , Niklas Hahn , Martin Hoefer , Conrad Schecker

We revisit the well-known online traveling salesman problem (OLTSP) and its extension, the online dial-a-ride problem (OLDARP). A server starting at a designated origin in a metric space, is required to serve online requests, and return to…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Ya-Chun Liang , Meng-Hsi Li , Chung-Shou Liao , Clifford Stein

We study web and mobile applications that are used to schedule advance service, from medical appointments to restaurant reservations. We model them as online weighted bipartite matching problems with non-stationary arrivals. We propose new…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-29 Xinshang Wang , Van-Anh Truong , David Bank

We consider a stochastic online problem where $n$ applicants arrive over time, one per time step. Upon arrival of each applicant their cost per time step is revealed, and we have to fix the duration of employment, starting immediately. This…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-05-31 Yann Disser , John Fearnley , Martin Gairing , Oliver Göbel , Max Klimm , Daniel Schmand , Alexander Skopalik , Andreas Tönnis

We consider a variant of the classical Secretary Problem. In this setting, the candidates are ranked according to some exchangeable random variable and the quest is to maximize the expected quality of the chosen aspirant. We find an upper…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-09-15 Pablo Blanc , Juan Pablo Borthagaray , Daniel Kohen , Martín Mereb

We study an online resource allocation problem under uncertainty about demand and about the reward of each type of demand (agents) for the resource. Even though dealing with demand uncertainty in resource allocation problems has been the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-11 Negin Gorlezaei , Patrick Jaillet , Zijie Zhou

We solve the secretary problem in the case that the ranked items arrive in a statistically biased order rather than in uniformly random order. The bias is given by the left-to-right-minimum exponentially tilted distribution with parameter…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-07-18 Ross G. Pinsky

When allocating indivisible items to agents, it is known that the only strategyproof mechanisms that satisfy a set of rather mild conditions are constrained serial dictatorships: given a fixed order over agents, at each step the designated…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Sylvain Bouveret , Hugo Gilbert , Jérôme Lang , Guillaume Méroué

We present a number of positive and negative results for variants of the matroid secretary problem. Most notably, we design a constant-factor competitive algorithm for the "random assignment" model where the weights are assigned randomly to…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2011-12-13 Shayan Oveis Gharan , Jan Vondrák