Related papers: Single-Sample Prophet Inequalities Revisited
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…
The prophet secretary problem is a combination of the prophet inequality and the secretary problem, where elements are drawn from known independent distributions and arrive in uniformly random order. In this work, we design 1) a…
We consider a combinatorial auction setting where buyers have fractionally subadditive (XOS) valuations over the items and the seller's objective is to maximize the social welfare. A prophet inequality in this setting bounds the competitive…
In the classical prophet inequality, a gambler observes a sequence of stochastic rewards $V_1,...,V_n$ and must decide, for each reward $V_i$, whether to keep it and stop the game or to forfeit the reward forever and reveal the next value…
Prophet inequalities and secretary problems have been extensively studied in recent years due to their elegance, connections to online algorithms, stochastic optimization, and mechanism design problems in game theoretic settings. Rubinstein…
We explore a prophet inequality problem, where the values of a sequence of items are drawn i.i.d. from some distribution, and an online decision maker must select one item irrevocably. We establish that $\mathrm{CR}_{\ell}$ the worst-case…
We investigate prophet inequalities with competitive ratios approaching $1$, seeking to generalize $k$-uniform matroids. We first show that large girth does not suffice: for all $k$, there exists a matroid of girth $\geq k$ and a prophet…
We introduce a variant of the classic prophet inequality, called \emph{residual prophet inequality} (RPI). In the RPI problem, we consider a finite sequence of $n$ nonnegative independent random values with known distributions, and a known…
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,…
We present a general framework for stochastic online maximization problems with combinatorial feasibility constraints. The framework establishes prophet inequalities by constructing price-based online approximation algorithms, a natural…
Prophet inequalities are a cornerstone in optimal stopping and online decision-making. Traditionally, they involve the sequential observation of $n$ non-negative independent random variables and face irrevocable accept-or-reject choices.…
In this paper, we introduce an over-time variant of the well-known prophet inequality with i.i.d. random variables. Instead of stopping with one realized value at some point in the process, we decide for each step how long we select the…
We take a unifying approach to single selection optimal stopping problems with random arrival order and independent sampling of items. In the problem we consider, a decision maker (DM) initially gets to sample each of $N$ items…
We study the classic single-choice prophet secretary problem through a resource augmentation lens. Our goal is to bound the $(1-\epsilon)$-competition complexity for different classes of online algorithms. This metric asks for the smallest…
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…
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…
In this paper, we study $k$-unit single sample prophet inequalities. A seller has $k$ identical, indivisible items to sell. A sequence of buyers arrive one-by-one, with each buyer's private value for the item, $X_i$, revealed to the seller…
In the ordinal Matroid Secretary Problem (MSP), elements from a weighted matroid are presented in random order to an algorithm that must incrementally select a large weight independent set. However, the algorithm can only compare pairs of…
We study online contention resolution schemes (OCRSs) and prophet inequalities for non-product distributions. Specifically, when the active set is sampled according to a pairwise-independent (PI) distribution, we show a…
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…