Related papers: The Prophet Inequality Can Be Solved Optimally wit…
A gambler walks into a hypothetical fair casino with a very real dollar bill, but by the time he leaves he's exchanged the dollar for a random amount of money. What is lost in the process? It may be that the gambler walks out at the end of…
Let X_1,X_2,... be a sequence of [0,1]-valued i.i.d. random variables, let c\geq 0 be a sampling cost for each observation and let Y_i=X_i-ic, i=1,2,.... For n=1,2,..., let M(Y_1,...,Y_n)=E(max_{1\leq i\leq n}Y_i) and…
Predicting the winner of an election is a favorite problem both for news media pundits and computational social choice theorists. Since it is often infeasible to elicit the preferences of all the voters in a typical prediction scenario, a…
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…
The General Lotto game is a popular variant of the famous Colonel Blotto game, in which two opposing players allocate limited resources over many battlefields. In this paper, we consider incomplete and asymmetric information formulations…
We revisit three fundamental problems in algorithms under uncertainty: the Secretary Problem, Prophet Inequality, and Stochastic Probing, each subject to general downward-closed constraints. When elements have binary values, all three…
We consider the online stochastic matching problem for bipartite graphs where edges adjacent to an online node must be probed to determine if they exist, based on known edge probabilities. Our algorithms respect commitment, in that if a…
The last success problem is an optimal stopping problem that aims to maximize the probability of stopping on the last success in a sequence of independent $n$ Bernoulli trials. In the classical setting where complete information about the…
The Prophet Inequality and Pandora's Box problems are fundamental stochastic problem with applications in Mechanism Design, Online Algorithms, Stochastic Optimization, Optimal Stopping, and Operations Research. A usual assumption in these…
We give elementary examples within a framework for studying decisions under uncertainty where probabilities are only roughly known. The framework, in gambling terms, is that the size of a bet is proportional to the gambler's perceived…
Assume that a grocery item is sold 1'234 times on a given day. What should an ideal forecast have predicted for such a well-selling item, on average? More generally, when considering a given outcome value, should the empirical average of…
We study the classic problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among a group of agents, and focus on the notion of approximate proportionality known as PROPm. Prior work showed that there exists an allocation that satisfies…
Motivated by applications in cyber security, we develop a simple game model for describing how a learning agent's private information influences an observing agent's inference process. The model describes a situation in which one of the…
We bound expected capture time and throttling number for the cop versus gambler game on a connected graph with $n$ vertices, a variant of the cop versus robber game that is played in darkness, where the adversary hops between vertices using…
The prophet and secretary problems demonstrate online scenarios involving the optimal stopping theory. In a typical prophet or secretary problem, selection decisions are assumed to be immediate and irrevocable. However, many online settings…
Betting games provide a natural setting to capture how information yields strategic advantage. The Kelly criterion for betting, long a cornerstone of portfolio theory and information theory, admits an interpretation in the limit of…
We develop an approach to solve Barberis (2012)'s casino gambling model in which a gambler whose preferences are specified by the cumulative prospect theory (CPT) must decide when to stop gambling by a prescribed deadline. We assume that…
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.…
The game of best choice (also known as the secretary problem) is a model for sequential decision making with a long history and many variations. The classical setup assumes that the sequence of candidate rankings are uniformly distributed.…
Can a probabilistic gambler get arbitrarily rich when all deterministic gamblers fail? We study this problem in the context of algorithmic randomness, introducing a new notion -- almost everywhere computable randomness. A binary sequence…