Related papers: Online Pandora's Boxes and Bandits
Weitzman introduced Pandora's box problem as a mathematical model of sequential search with inspection costs, in which a searcher is allowed to select a prize from one of $n$ alternatives. Several decades later, Doval introduced a close…
We consider a class of optimization problems over stochastic variables where the algorithm can learn information about the value of any variable through a series of costly steps; we model this information acquisition process as a Markov…
In the online (time-series) search problem, a player is presented with a sequence of prices which are revealed in an online manner. In the standard definition of the problem, for each revealed price, the player must decide irrevocably…
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…
We consider the problem of online fair division of indivisible goods to players when there are a finite number of types of goods and player values are drawn from distributions with unknown means. Our goal is to maximize social welfare…
Motivated by bursty bandwidth allocation and by the allocation of virtual machines to servers in the cloud, we consider the online problem of packing items with random sizes into unit-capacity bins. Items arrive sequentially, but upon…
In the matroid buyback problem, an algorithm observes a sequence of bids and must decide whether to accept each bid at the moment it arrives, subject to a matroid constraint on the set of accepted bids. Decisions to reject bids are…
We introduce the Online Unbounded Knapsack Problem with Removal, a variation of the well-known Online Knapsack Problem. Items, each with a weight and value, arrive online and an algorithm must decide on whether or not to pack them into a…
Martin Weitzman's "Pandora's problem" furnishes the mathematical basis for optimal search theory in economics. Nearly 40 years later, Laura Doval introduced a version of the problem in which the searcher is not obligated to pay the cost of…
Pandora's problem is a fundamental model in economics that studies optimal search strategies under costly inspection. In this paper we initiate the study of Pandora's problem with combinatorial costs, capturing many real-life scenarios…
A central problem in online learning and decision making -- from bandits to reinforcement learning -- is to understand what modeling assumptions lead to sample-efficient learning guarantees. We consider a general adversarial decision making…
Bin packing is a classic optimization problem with a wide range of applications, from load balancing to supply chain management. In this work, we study the online variant of the problem, in which a sequence of items of various sizes must be…
As an important psychological and social experiment, the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) treats the choice to cooperate or defect as an atomic action. We propose to study the behaviors of online learning algorithms in the Iterated…
In this paper we propose a novel framework for decentralized, online learning by many learners. At each moment of time, an instance characterized by a certain context may arrive to each learner; based on the context, the learner can select…
Online decision-makers often obtain predictions on future variables, such as arrivals, demands, inventories, and so on. These predictions can be generated from simple forecasting algorithms for univariate time-series, all the way to…
We investigate the role of commitment in optimal stopping by studying all the variants between Prophet Inequality (PI) and Pandora's Box (PB). Both problems deal with a set of variables drawn from known distributions. In PI the gambler…
In the knapsack problem, we are given a knapsack of some capacity and a set of items, each with a size and a value. The goal is to pack a selection of these items fitting the knapsack that maximizes the total value. The online version of…
Recommender systems are a ubiquitous feature of online platforms. Increasingly, they are explicitly tasked with increasing users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a…
We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead…
We consider max-weighted matching with costs for learning the weights, modeled as a "Pandora's Box" on each endpoint of an edge. Each vertex has an initially-unknown value for being matched to a neighbor, and an algorithm must pay some cost…