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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-12 Tomer Ezra , Tamar Garbuz

We investigate non-adaptive algorithms for matroid prophet inequalities. Matroid prophet inequalities have been considered resolved since 2012 when [KW12] introduced thresholds that guarantee a tight 2-approximation to the prophet; however,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Shuchi Chawla , Kira Goldner , Anna R. Karlin , J. Benjamin Miller

Prophet inequalities are a central object of study in optimal stopping theory. A gambler is sent values in an online fashion, sampled from an instance of independent distributions, in an adversarial, random or selected order, depending on…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Giordano Giambartolomei , Frederik Mallmann-Trenn , Raimundo Saona

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-25 Lin An , Andrew A. Li , Benjamin Moseley , Gabriel Visotsky

Prophet inequalities consist of many beautiful statements that establish tight performance ratios between online and offline allocation algorithms. Typically, tightness is established by constructing an algorithmic guarantee and a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Jiashuo Jiang , Will Ma , Jiawei Zhang

Motivated by the dynamic assortment offerings and item pricings occurring in e-commerce, we study a general problem of allocating finite inventories to heterogeneous customers arriving sequentially. We analyze this problem under the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-05-14 Will Ma , David Simchi-Levi

We study an online version of the max-min fair allocation problem for indivisible items. In this problem, items arrive one by one, and each item must be allocated irrevocably on arrival to one of $n$ agents, who have additive valuations for…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-11-16 Yasushi Kawase , Hanna Sumita

We provide a near-optimal, computationally efficient algorithm for the unit-demand pricing problem, where a seller wants to price n items to optimize revenue against a unit-demand buyer whose values for the items are independently drawn…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-10-28 Yang Cai , Constantinos Daskalakis

Consider a gambler who observes a sequence of independent, non-negative random numbers and is allowed to stop the sequence at any time, claiming a reward equal to the most recent observation. The famous prophet inequality of Krengel,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2012-01-24 Robert Kleinberg , S. Matthew Weinberg

We consider prophet inequalities in a setting where agents correspond to both elements in a matroid and vertices in a graph. A set of agents is feasible if they form both an independent set in the matroid and an independent set in the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-07-17 Jackie Baek , Will Ma

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Andrés Cristi , Sigal Oren

We study the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods and focus on the classic fairness notion of proportionality. The indivisibility of the goods is long known to pose highly non-trivial obstacles to achieving fairness, and a very…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-01-15 Artem Baklanov , Pranav Garimidi , Vasilis Gkatzelis , Daniel Schoepflin

Over the past two decades, significant strides have been made in stochastic problems such as revenue-optimal auction design and prophet inequalities, traditionally modeled with $n$ independent random variables to represent the values of $n$…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Vasilis Livanos , Kalen Patton , Sahil Singla

Competition complexity formalizes a compelling intuition: rather than refining the mechanism, how much additional competition is sufficient for a simple mechanism to compete with an optimal one? We begin the study of this question in…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Eugenio Cruz-Ossa , Sebastian Perez-Salazar , Victor Verdugo

We study fair resource allocation when the resources contain a mixture of divisible and indivisible goods, focusing on the well-studied fairness notion of maximin share fairness (MMS). With only indivisible goods, a full MMS allocation may…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Xiaohui Bei , Shengxin Liu , Xinhang Lu , Hongao Wang

We consider descending price auctions for selling $m$ units of a good to unit demand i.i.d. buyers where there is an exogenous bound of $k$ on the number of price levels the auction clock can take. The auctioneer's problem is to choose…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Saeed Alaei , Ali Makhdoumi , Azarakhsh Malekian , Rad Niazadeh

We study the classic single-choice prophet inequality problem through a resource augmentation lens. Our goal is to bound the $(1-\varepsilon)$-competition complexity of different types of online algorithms. This metric asks for the smallest…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Johannes Brustle , José Correa , Paul Dütting , Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Victor Verdugo

Forecasting is usually framed as a problem of model choice. This paper starts earlier, asking how much predictive information is available at each horizon. Under logarithmic loss, the answer is exact: the mutual information between the…

Applications · Statistics 2026-03-31 Peter Maurice Catt

We study a fundamental problem in optimization under uncertainty. There are $n$ boxes; each box $i$ contains a hidden reward $x_i$. Rewards are drawn i.i.d. from an unknown distribution $\mathcal{D}$. For each box $i$, we see $y_i$, an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Trung Dang , Aranyak Mehta , Alexandros Psomas , Qian Zhang

We study the question of existence and fast computation of fair and efficient allocations of indivisible resources among agents with additive valuations. As such allocations may not exist for arbitrary instances, we ask if they exist for…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Aprup Kale , Rucha Kulkarni , Navya Garg