Related papers: The Two-Sided Game of Googol and Sample-Based Prop…
In the classic prophet inequality, samples from independent random variables arrive online. A gambler that knows the distributions must decide at each point in time whether to stop and pick the current sample or to continue and lose that…
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…
Optimal stopping theory is a powerful tool for analyzing scenarios such as online auctions in which we generally require optimizing an objective function over the space of stopping rules for an allocation process under uncertainty. Perhaps…
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.…
In the Prophet Secretary problem, samples from a known set of probability distributions arrive one by one in a uniformly random order, and an algorithm must irrevocably pick one of the samples as soon as it arrives. The goal is to maximize…
In this work, we study the single-choice prophet inequality problem, where a gambler faces a sequence of~$n$ online i.i.d. random variables drawn from an unknown distribution. When a variable reveals its value, the gambler needs to decide…
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 develop…
Suppose a customer is faced with a sequence of fluctuating prices, such as for airfare or a product sold by a large online retailer. Given distributional information about what price they might face each day, how should they choose when to…
The prophet secretary problem is a combination of the prophet inequality and the secretary problem, where elements are drawn from known independent distributions and arrive in uniformly random order. In this work, we design 1) a…
The value maximization version of the secretary problem is the problem of hiring a candidate with the largest value from a randomly ordered sequence of candidates. In this work, we consider a setting where predictions of candidate values…
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…
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 ordinal online problems, i.e., tasks that only require pairwise comparisons between elements of the input. A classic example is the secretary problem and the game of googol, as well as its multiple combinatorial extensions such…
In the prophet inequality problem, a gambler faces a sequence of items arriving online with values drawn independently from known distributions. On seeing an item, the gambler must choose whether to accept its value as her reward and quit…
We study the prophet secretary problem, a well-studied variant of the classic prophet inequality, where values are drawn from independent known distributions but arrive in uniformly random order. Upon seeing a value at each step, the…
The secretary problem is one of the fundamental problems in online decision making; a tight competitive ratio for this problem of $1/\mathrm{e} \approx 0.368$ has been known since the 1960s. Much more recently, the study of algorithms with…
Many online problems are studied in stochastic settings for which inputs are samples from a known distribution, given in advance, or from an unknown distribution. Such distributions model both beyond-worst-case inputs and, when given,…
In a prophet inequality problem, $n$ independent random variables are presented to a gambler one by one. The gambler decides when to stop the sequence and obtains the most recent value as reward. We evaluate a stopping rule by the…
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.…
In the online random-arrival model, an algorithm receives a sequence of n requests that arrive in a random order. The algorithm is expected to make an irrevocable decision with regard to each request based only on the observed history. We…