Related papers: Answer to an open question concerning the $1/e$-st…
We solve the secretary problem in the case that the ranked items arrive in a statistically biased order rather than in uniformly random order. The bias is given by a Mallows distribution with parameter $q\in(0,1)$, so that higher ranked…
We consider a model where an agent has a repeated decision to make and wishes to maximize their total payoff. Payoffs are influenced by an action taken by the agent, but also an unknown state of the world that evolves over time. Before…
In this paper we develop a unified approach for solving a wide class of sequential selection problems. This class includes, but is not limited to, selection problems with no-information, rank-dependent rewards, and considers both fixed as…
We address the fundamental problem of selection under uncertainty by modeling it from the perspective of Bayesian persuasion. In our model, a decision maker with imperfect information always selects the option with the highest expected…
The game of best choice (also known as the secretary problem) is a model for sequential decision making with a long history and many variations. The classical setup assumes that the sequence of candidate rankings are uniformly distributed.…
We study a ranking and selection problem of learning from choice-based feedback with dynamic assortments. In this problem, a company sequentially displays a set of items to a population of customers and collects their choices as feedback.…
We study the classic divide-and-choose method for equitably allocating divisible goods between two players who are rational, self-interested Bayesian agents. The players have additive values for the goods. The prior distributions on those…
In the impartial selection problem, a subset of agents up to a fixed size $k$ among a group of $n$ is to be chosen based on votes cast by the agents themselves. A selection mechanism is impartial if no agent can influence its own chance of…
In the subject of optimal stopping, the classical secretary problem is concerned with optimally selecting the best of $n$ candidates when their relative ranks are observed sequentially. This problem has been extended to optimally selecting…
Elections and opinion polls often have many candidates, with the aim to either rank the candidates or identify a small set of winners according to voters' preferences. In practice, voters do not provide a full ranking; instead, each voter…
Synthesis of bulletproof strategies in imperfect information scenarios is a notoriously hard problem. In this paper, we suggest that it is sometimes a viable alternative to aim at "reasonably good" strategies instead. This makes sense not…
Motivated by hiring pipelines, we study three selection and ordering problems in which applicants for a finite set of positions must be interviewed or sent offers. There is a finite time budget for interviewing/sending offers, and every…
We consider a simple optimal probabilistic problem solving strategy that searches through potential solution candidates in a specific order. We are interested in what impact has interchanging the order of two solution candidates with…
We study the problem of selling information to a data-buyer who faces a decision problem under uncertainty. We consider the classic Bayesian decision-theoretic model pioneered by [Blackwell, 1951, 1953]. Initially, the data buyer has only…
We consider a distributed server system consisting of a large number of servers, each with limited capacity on multiple resources (CPU, memory, disk, etc.). Jobs with different rewards arrive over time and require certain amounts of…
We examine receiver-optimal mechanisms for aggregating information divided across many biased senders. Each sender privately observes an unconditionally independent signal about an unknown state, so no sender can verify another's report. A…
Motivated by applications where impatience is pervasive and evaluation times are uncertain, we study a selection model where options may expire at an unknown point in time and evaluation times are stochastic. Initially, the decision-maker…
Optimising queries in real-world situations under imperfect conditions is still a problem that has not been fully solved. We consider finding the optimal order in which to execute a given set of selection operators under partial ignorance…
We give a memoryless scale-invariant randomized algorithm for the Buffer Management with Bounded Delay problem that is e/(e-1)-competitive against an adaptive adversary, together with better performance guarantees for many restricted…
The task of learning to pick a single preferred example out a finite set of examples, an "optimal choice problem", is a supervised machine learning problem with complex, structured input. Problems of optimal choice emerge often in various…