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Free order prophet inequalities bound the ratio between the expected value obtained by two parties each selecting a value from a set of independent random variables: a "prophet" who knows the value of each variable and may select the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Makis Arsenis , Odysseas Drosis , Robert Kleinberg

Online contention resolution schemes (OCRSs) were proposed by Feldman, Svensson, and Zenklusen as a generic technique to round a fractional solution in the matroid polytope in an online fashion. It has found applications in several…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-06-26 Euiwoong Lee , Sahil Singla

There are two major models of value uncertainty in the optimal stopping literature: the secretary model, which assumes no prior knowledge, and the prophet inequality model, which assumes full information about value distributions. In…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Tian Bai , Zhiyi Huang , Chui Shan Lee , Dongchen Li

A set function can be extended to the unit cube in various ways; the correlation gap measures the ratio between two natural extensions. This quantity has been identified as the performance guarantee in a range of approximation algorithms…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-24 Edin Husić , Zhuan Khye Koh , Georg Loho , László A. Végh

Prophet inequalities are a central object of study in optimal stopping theory. In the iid model, a gambler sees values in an online fashion, sampled independently from a given distribution. Upon observing each value, the gambler either…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Giordano Giambartolomei , Frederik Mallmann-Trenn , Raimundo Saona

We study a variant of the single-choice prophet inequality problem where the decision-maker does not know the underlying distribution and has only access to a set of samples from the distributions. Rubinstein et al. [2020] showed that the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Tomer Ezra

We introduce a new decomposition technique for random variables that maps a generic instance of the prophet inequalities problem to a new instance where all but a constant number of variables have a tractable structure that we refer to as…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Allen Liu , Renato Paes Leme , Martin Pal , Jon Schneider , Balasubramanian Sivan

The secretary problem is a classic model for online decision making. Recently, combinatorial extensions such as matroid or matching secretary problems have become an important tool to study algorithmic problems in dynamic markets. Here the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-08-28 Martin Hoefer , Bojana Kodric

We study the i.i.d. $k$-selection prophet inequality problem, where a decision-maker sequentially observes $n$ independent nonnegative rewards and may accept at most $k$ of them without knowledge of future realizations. The objective is to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-24 Jieming Kong , Karthyek Murthy

We introduce several generalizations of classical computer science problems obtained by replacing simpler objective functions with general submodular functions. The new problems include submodular load balancing, which generalizes load…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2010-06-02 Zoya Svitkina , Lisa Fleischer

In the adaptive ProbeMax problem, given a collection of mutually-independent random variables $X_1, \ldots, X_n$, our goal is to design an adaptive probing policy for sequentially sampling at most $k$ of these variables, with the objective…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Guillermo Gallego , Danny Segev

We devise a general graph-theoretic framework for studying prophet inequalities. In this framework, an agent traverses a directed acyclic graph from a starting node $s$ to a target node $t$. Each edge has a value that is sampled from a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Andrés Cristi , Sigal Oren

We consider prophet inequalities in a setting where agents correspond to both elements in a matroid and vertices in a graph. A set of agents is feasible if they form both an independent set in the matroid and an independent set in the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-07-17 Jackie Baek , Will Ma

A decisionmaker faces $n$ alternatives, each of which represents a potential reward. After investing costly resources into investigating the alternatives, the decisionmaker may select one, or more generally a feasible subset, and obtain the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Robin Bowers , Elias Lindgren , Bo Waggoner

We introduce the \textit{prophet inequality with uncertain acceptance} model, in which a decision maker sequentially observes a sequence of independent options, each characterized by a value $x_i$ and an acceptance probability $p_i$, both…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Emile Martinez , Felipe Garrido-Lucero , Umberto Grandi , Sebastian Pérez-Salazar

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Eugenio Cruz-Ossa , Sebastian Perez-Salazar , Victor Verdugo

We study the prophet inequality when the gambler has an access only to a single sample from each distribution. Rubinstein, Wang and Weinberg showed that an optimal guarantee of 1/2 can be achieved when the underlying matroid has rank 1,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-07-03 Kanstantsin Pashkovich , Alice Sayutina

We consider an online multi-weighted generalization of several classic online optimization problems, called the online combinatorial assignment problem. We are given an independence system over a ground set of elements and agents that…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Javier Marinkovic , José A. Soto , Victor Verdugo

The prophet inequalities problem has received significant study over the past decades and has several applications such as to online auctions. In this paper, we study two variants of the i.i.d. prophet inequalities problem, namely the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-12-01 William Marshall , Nolan Miranda , Albert Zuo

Constrained submodular maximization problems have long been studied, with near-optimal results known under a variety of constraints when the submodular function is monotone. The case of non-monotone submodular maximization is less…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2010-10-07 Anupam Gupta , Aaron Roth , Grant Schoenebeck , Kunal Talwar