Related papers: Prophet Inequalities with Linear Correlations and …
We study a continuous and infinite time horizon counterpart to the classic prophet inequality, which we term the stationary prophet inequality problem. Here, copies of a good arrive and perish according to Poisson point processes. Buyers…
In the classical prophet inequality, a gambler observes a sequence of stochastic rewards $V_1,...,V_n$ and must decide, for each reward $V_i$, whether to keep it and stop the game or to forfeit the reward forever and reveal the next value…
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…
Prophet inequalities are fundamental optimal stopping problems, where a decision-maker observes sequentially items with values sampled independently from known distributions, and must decide at each new observation to either stop and gain…
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…
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 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 rich literature on online Bayesian selection problems has long focused on so-called prophet inequalities, which compare the gain of an online algorithm to that of a "prophet" who knows the future. An equally-natural, though…
We study threshold testing, an elementary probing model with the goal to choose a large value out of $n$ i.i.d. random variables. An algorithm can test each variable $X_i$ once for some threshold $t_i$, and the test returns binary feedback…
We consider the problem of selling perishable items to a stream of buyers in order to maximize social welfare. A seller starts with a set of identical items, and each arriving buyer wants any one item, and has a valuation drawn i.i.d. from…
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…
We consider the prophet inequality problem for (not necessarily bipartite) matching problems with independent edge values, under both edge arrivals and vertex arrivals. We show constant-factor prophet inequalities for the case where the…
Prophet inequalities bound the expected reward that can be obtained in a stopping problem by the optimal reward of its corresponding off-line version. We propose a systematic technique for deriving prophet inequalities for stopping problems…
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…
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,…
In online sales, sellers usually offer each potential buyer a posted price in a take-it-or-leave fashion. Buyers can sometimes see posted prices faced by other buyers, and changing the price frequently could be considered unfair. The…
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…
Most of the literature on online algorithms in revenue management focuses on settings with irrevocable decisions, where once a decision is made upon the arrival of a new input, it cannot be canceled later. Motivated by modern applications…
In the online 2-bounded auction problem, we have a collection of items represented as nodes in a graph and bundles of size two represented by edges. Agents are presented sequentially, each with a random weight function over the bundles. The…
We study a variant of the single-choice prophet inequality problem where the decision-maker does not know the underlying distribution and has only access to a set of samples from the distributions. Rubinstein et al. [2020] showed that the…