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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

We consider an online multi-weighted generalization of several classic online optimization problems, called the online combinatorial assignment problem. We are given an independence system over a ground set of elements and agents that…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Javier Marinkovic , José A. Soto , Victor Verdugo

In online combinatorial allocations/auctions, n bidders sequentially arrive, each with a combinatorial valuation (such as submodular/XOS) over subsets of m indivisible items. The aim is to immediately allocate a subset of the remaining…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Paul Dütting , Thomas Kesselheim , Brendan Lucier , Rebecca Reiffenhäuser , 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

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

A prophet inequality states, for some $\alpha\in[0,1]$, that the expected value achievable by a gambler who sequentially observes random variables $X_1,\dots,X_n$ and selects one of them is at least an $\alpha$ fraction of the maximum value…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-11-24 José Correa , Paul Dütting , Felix Fischer , Kevin Schewior , Bruno Ziliotto

In the adaptive ProbeMax problem, given a collection of mutually-independent random variables $X_1, \ldots, X_n$, our goal is to design an adaptive probing policy for sequentially sampling at most $k$ of these variables, with the objective…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Guillermo Gallego , Danny Segev

We study the prophet inequality, a fundamental problem in online decision-making and optimal stopping, in a practical setting where rewards are observed only through noisy realizations and reward distributions are unknown. At each stage,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-03 Jung-hun Kim , Vianney Perchet

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

Prophet inequalities are performance guarantees for online algorithms (a.k.a. stopping rules) solving the following "hiring problem": a decision maker sequentially inspects candidates whose values are independent random numbers and is asked…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-05-23 Makis Arsenis , Robert Kleinberg

Prophet inequality concerns a basic optimal stopping problem and states that simple threshold stopping policies -- i.e., accepting the first reward larger than a certain threshold -- can achieve tight $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation to the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Wei Tang , Haifeng Xu , Ruimin Zhang , Derek Zhu

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-10 Halil I. Bayrak , Mustafa Ç. Pınar , Rakesh Vohra

A longstanding open problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design is to design computationally-efficient truthful mechanisms for (approximately) maximizing welfare in combinatorial auctions with submodular bidders. The first such mechanism was…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-11-11 Sepehr Assadi , Sahil Singla

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.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Neel Patel , David Wajc

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Tomer Ezra

Many auction settings implicitly or explicitly require that bidders are treated equally ex-ante. This may be because discrimination is philosophically or legally impermissible, or because it is practically difficult to implement or…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-11-06 Christos Tzamos , Christopher A. Wilkens

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Paul Dütting , Federico Fusco , Philip Lazos , Stefano Leonardi , Rebecca Reiffenhäuser

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Andrés Cristi , Bruno Ziliotto

We introduce a model of competing agents in a prophet setting, where rewards arrive online, and decisions are made immediately and irrevocably. The rewards are unknown from the outset, but they are drawn from a known probability…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Ron Kupfer

We present pricing mechanisms for several online resource allocation problems which obtain tight or nearly tight approximations to social welfare. In our settings, buyers arrive online and purchase bundles of items; buyers' values for the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-07-16 Shuchi Chawla , J. Benjamin Miller , Yifeng Teng