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Our goal is to deploy a high-accuracy system starting with zero training examples. We consider an "on-the-job" setting, where as inputs arrive, we use real-time crowdsourcing to resolve uncertainty where needed and output our prediction…
This report investigates the optimal design of event-triggered estimation for first-order linear stochastic systems. The problem is posed as a two-player team problem with a partially nested information pattern. The two players are given by…
It is well known that in games with imperfect information, such as poker, bluffing with some probability can be a component of the optimal strategy. However, as far as we know, nobody has ever exhibited a Scrabble position in which the…
Election rules are formal processes that aggregate voters preferences, typically to select a single candidate, called the winner. Most of the election rules studied in the literature require the voters to rank the candidates from the most…
We study a crowdsourcing problem where the platform aims to incentivize distributed workers to provide high quality and truthful solutions without the ability to verify the solutions. While most prior work assumes that the platform and…
Consider a uniformly random deck consisting of cards labelled by numbers from $1$ through $n$, possibly with repeats. A guesser guesses the top card, after which it is revealed and removed and the game continues. What is the expected number…
In many settings people must give numerical scores to entities from a small discrete set. For instance, rating physical attractiveness from 1--5 on dating sites, or papers from 1--10 for conference reviewing. We study the problem of…
Commercial entries, such as hotels, are ranked according to score by a search engine or recommendation system, and the score of each can be improved upon by making a targeted investment, e.g., advertising. We study the problem of how a…
Motivated by applications to word-of-mouth advertising, we consider a game-theoretic scenario in which competing advertisers want to target initial adopters in a social network. Each advertiser wishes to maximize the resulting cascade of…
The prophet and secretary problems demonstrate online scenarios involving the optimal stopping theory. In a typical prophet or secretary problem, selection decisions are assumed to be immediate and irrevocable. However, many online settings…
There are many applications in which it is desirable to order rather than classify instances. Here we consider the problem of learning how to order instances given feedback in the form of preference judgments, i.e., statements to the effect…
We consider the scheduling problem on $n$ strategic unrelated machines when no payments are allowed, under the objective of minimizing the makespan. We adopt the model introduced in [Koutsoupias, Theory Comput. Syst. (2014)] where a machine…
In the late sixties the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced an apparently paradoxical principle, named since then after him, which can be summarized as follows: {\it 'Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the…
Sequential allocation is a simple allocation mechanism in which agents are given pre-specified turns and each agents gets the most preferred item that is still available. It has long been known that sequential allocation is not…
We consider multi-agent systems where agents' preferences are aggregated via sequential majority voting: each decision is taken by performing a sequence of pairwise comparisons where each comparison is a weighted majority vote among the…
The Bayesian persuasion paradigm of strategic communication models interaction between a privately-informed agent, called the sender, and an ignorant but rational agent, called the receiver. The goal is typically to design a (near-)optimal…
We consider the problem of online interval scheduling on a single machine, where intervals arrive online in an order chosen by an adversary, and the algorithm must output a set of non-conflicting intervals. Traditionally in scheduling…
We investigate the classical active pure exploration problem in Markov Decision Processes, where the agent sequentially selects actions and, from the resulting system trajectory, aims at identifying the best policy as fast as possible. We…
Given a huge set of applicants, how should a firm allocate sequential resume screenings, phone interviews, and in-person site visits? In a tiered interview process, later stages (e.g., in-person visits) are more informative, but also more…
Learning from Preferential Feedback (LfPF) plays an essential role in training Large Language Models, as well as certain types of interactive learning agents. However, a substantial gap exists between the theory and application of LfPF…