Related papers: Finding the Second-Best Candidate under the Mallow…
We study a learning-augmented variant of the secretary problem, recently introduced by Fujii and Yoshida (2023), in which the decision-maker has access to machine-learned predictions of candidate values. The central challenge is to balance…
In the matroid secretary problem, the elements of a matroid $\mathcal{M}$ arrive in random order. Once we observe an item we need to irrevocably decide whether or not to accept it. The set of selected elements should form an independent set…
Ranking and comparing items is crucial for collecting information about preferences in many areas, from marketing to politics. The Mallows rank model is among the most successful approaches to analyse rank data, but its computational…
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…
Online advertising has motivated interest in online selection problems. Displaying ads to the right users benefits both the platform (e.g., via pay-per-click) and the advertisers (by increasing their reach). In practice, not all users click…
We revisit the problem of selecting an item from $n$ choices that appear before us in random sequential order so as to minimize the expected rank of the item selected. In particular, we examine the stopping rule where we reject the first…
The Matroid Secretary Problem (MSP) is one of the most prominent settings for online resource allocation and optimal stopping. A decision-maker is presented with a ground set of elements $E$ revealed sequentially and in random order. Upon…
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…
We consider a variant of the classical Secretary Problem. In this setting, the candidates are ranked according to some exchangeable random variable and the quest is to maximize the expected quality of the chosen aspirant. We find an upper…
We study various generalizations of the secretary problem with submodular objective functions. Generally, a set of requests is revealed step-by-step to an algorithm in random order. For each request, one option has to be selected so as to…
The secretary problem became one of the most prominent online selection problems due to its numerous applications in online mechanism design. The task is to select a maximum weight subset of elements subject to given constraints, where…
In this paper, we present a novel method for computing the asymptotic values of both the optimal threshold, and the probability of success in sequences of optimal stopping problems. This method, based on the resolution of a first-order…
In this paper, we discuss a stochastic decision problem of optimally selecting the order in which to try $n$ opportunities that may yield an uncertain reward in the future. The motivation came out from pure curiosity, after an informal…
In learning-augmented online algorithms, predictions are usually valued for what they say: a value estimate, a solution, or an algorithmic recommendation. This paper shows that predictions can also be valuable solely due to their arrival…
We define and study a new variant of the secretary problem. Whereas in the classic setting multiple secretaries compete for a single position, we study the case where the secretaries arrive one at a time and are assigned, in an on-line…
Cowan and Zabczyk (1978) introduced a continuous-time generalisation of the secretary problem, where offers arrive at epochs of a homogeneous Poisson process. We expand their work to encompass the last-success problem under the…
The game of best choice, also known as the secretary problem, is a model for sequential decision making with many variations in the literature. Notably, the classical setup assumes that the sequence of candidate rankings is uniformly…
We consider generalizations of the classical secretary problem, also known as the problem of optimal choice, to posets where the only information we have is the size of the poset and the number of maximal elements. We show that, given this…
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,…
There are two major models of value uncertainty in the optimal stopping literature: the secretary model, which assumes no prior knowledge, and the prophet inequality model, which assumes full information about value distributions. In…