Related papers: Matroid Secretary Is Equivalent to Contention Reso…
We revisit three fundamental problems in algorithms under uncertainty: the Secretary Problem, Prophet Inequality, and Stochastic Probing, each subject to general downward-closed constraints. When elements have binary values, all three…
Finding a maximum cardinality common independent set in two matroids (also known as \textsc{Matroid Intersection}) is a classical combinatorial optimization problem, which generalizes several well-known problems, such as finding a maximum…
Online Contention Resolution Schemes (OCRS's) represent a modern tool for selecting a subset of elements, subject to resource constraints, when the elements are presented to the algorithm sequentially. OCRS's have led to some of the…
Traditionally, the problem of apportioning the seats of a legislative body has been viewed as a one-shot process with no dynamic considerations. While this approach is reasonable for some settings, dynamic aspects play an important role in…
We study online combinatorial allocation problems in the secretary setting, under interdependent values. In the interdependent model, introduced by Milgrom and Weber (1982), each agent possesses a private signal that captures her…
Suppose a set of requests arrives online: each request gives some value $v_i$ if accepted, but requires using some amount of each of $d$ resources. Our cost is a convex function of the vector of total utilization of these $d$ resources.…
We study a variant of the secretary problem where candidates come from independent, not necessarily identical distributions known to us, and show that we can do at least as well as in the IID setting. This resolves a conjecture of…
We revisit the classic Pandora's Box (PB) problem under correlated distributions on the box values. Recent work of arXiv:1911.01632 obtained constant approximate algorithms for a restricted class of policies for the problem that visit boxes…
In this paper, we study contention resolution schemes for matchings. Given a fractional matching $x$ and a random set $R(x)$ where each edge $e$ appears independently with probability $x_e$, we want to select a matching $M \subseteq R(x)$…
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…
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 knapsack problem is one of the classical problems in combinatorial optimization: Given a set of items, each specified by its size and profit, the goal is to find a maximum profit packing into a knapsack of bounded capacity. In the…
We consider the rank reduction problem for matroids: Given a matroid M and an integer k, find a minimum size subset of elements of M whose removal reduces the rank of M by at least k. When M is a graphical matroid this problem is the…
The Joint Replenishment Problem (JRP) is a classical inventory management problem, that aims to model the trade-off between coordinating orders for multiple commodities (and their cost) with holding costs incurred by meeting demand in…
Which ads should we display in sponsored search in order to maximize our revenue? How should we dynamically rank information sources to maximize the value of the ranking? These applications exhibit strong diminishing returns: Redundancy…
Describing minimal generating set of a toric ideal is a well-studied and difficult problem. In 1980 White conjectured that the toric ideal associated to a matroid is equal to the ideal generated by quadratic binomials corresponding to…
A common approach for designing scalable algorithms for massive data sets is to distribute the computation across, say $k$, machines and process the data using limited communication between them. A particularly appealing framework here is…
We analyze the secretary problem in the case that the $n$ ranked items arrive not in uniformly random order but rather according to a certain type of Luce distribution or according to a Mallows distribution on the set $S_n$ of permutations…
We study variants of the secretary problem, where $N$, the number of candidates, is a random variable, and the decision maker wants to maximize the probability of success -- picking the largest number among the $N$ candidates -- using only…
In the Inverse Matroid problem, we are given a matroid, a fixed basis $B$, and an initial weight function, and the goal is to minimally modify the weights -- measured by some function -- so that $B$ becomes a maximum-weight basis. The…