Related papers: Secretary problem and two almost the same consecut…
We study the single-choice Prophet Inequality problem when the gambler is given access to samples. We show that the optimal competitive ratio of $1/2$ can be achieved with a single sample from each distribution. When the distributions are…
Let $X$ be the constrained random walk on ${\mathbb Z}_+^2$ with increments $(1,0)$, $(-1,0)$, $(0,1)$ and $(0,-1)$; $X$ represents, at arrivals and service completions, the lengths of two queues working in parallel whose service and…
We study the computational complexity of committee selection problem for several approval-based voting rules in the presence of outliers. Our first result shows that outlier consideration makes committee selection problem intractable for…
Consider an election where the set of candidates is partitioned into parties, and each party must choose exactly one candidate to nominate for the election held over all nominees. The Necessary President problem asks whether a candidate, if…
Let $P:\{0,1\}^k \to \{0,1\}$ be a nontrivial $k$-ary predicate. Consider a random instance of the constraint satisfaction problem $\mathrm{CSP}(P)$ on $n$ variables with $\Delta n$ constraints, each being $P$ applied to $k$ randomly chosen…
There is a set of n indivisible items (or chores), and a set of n players. Each day, a single item should be assigned to each player. We want to ensure that all players feel that they have been treated fairly, not only after the last day,…
Maximum satisfiability is a canonical NP-hard optimization problem that appears empirically hard for random instances. Let us say that a Conjunctive normal form (CNF) formula consisting of $k$-clauses is $p$-satisfiable if there exists a…
In the well-studied Stable Roommates problem, we seek a stable matching of agents into pairs, where no two agents prefer each other over their assigned partners. However, some instances of this problem are unsolvable, lacking any stable…
Consider $n$ players whose "scores" are independent and identically distributed values $\{X_i\}_{i=1}^n$ from some discrete distribution $F$. We pay special attention to the cases where (i) $F$ is geometric with parameter $p\to0$ and (ii)…
Let $X_n,...,X_1$ be i.i.d. random variables with distribution function $F$. A statistician, knowing $F$, observes the $X$ values sequentially and is given two chances to choose $X$'s using stopping rules. The statistician's goal is to stop…
We introduce the {\sc classified stable matching} problem, a problem motivated by academic hiring. Suppose that a number of institutes are hiring faculty members from a pool of applicants. Both institutes and applicants have preferences…
We show that the matroid secretary problem is equivalent to correlated contention resolution in the online random-order model. Specifically, the matroid secretary conjecture is true if and only if every matroid admits an online random-order…
Let $A^{(n)}_{l;k}\subset S_n$ denote the event that the set of $l$ consecutive numbers $\{k,k+1,\cdots, k+l-1\}$ appear in a set of $l$ consecutive positions. Let $p=\{p_j\}_{j=1}^\infty$ be a distribution on $\mathbb{N}$ with $p_j>0$. Let…
The evaluation of incomplete satisfiability solvers depends critically on the availability of hard satisfiable instances. A plausible source of such instances consists of random k-SAT formulas whose clauses are chosen uniformly from among…
A high number of discrete optimization problems, including Vertex Cover, Set Cover or Feedback Vertex Set, can be unified into the class of covering problems. Several of them were shown to be inapproximable by deterministic algorithms. This…
We consider the exact sampling of the first passage of a stable subordinator across a non-increasing regular barrier. First, the sampling is reduced to one from a bivariate distribution parameterized by the index $\alpha$ of the…
Most prior work on online matching problems has been with the flexibility of keeping some vertices unmatched. We study three related online matching problems with the constraint of matching every vertex, i.e., with no rejections. We adopt a…
We consider search by mobile agents for a hidden, idle target, placed on the infinite line. Feasible solutions are agent trajectories in which all agents reach the target sooner or later. A special feature of our problem is that the agents…
Let $S$ be a string of length $n$. In this paper we introduce the notion of \emph{string attractor}: a subset of the string's positions $[1,n]$ such that every distinct substring of $S$ has an occurrence crossing one of the attractor's…
We prove tight lower bounds for the following variant of the counting problem considered by Aaronson, Kothari, Kretschmer, and Thaler (2020). The task is to distinguish whether an input set $x\subseteq [n]$ has size either $k$ or…