Related papers: Submission Fees in Risk-Taking Contests
Calculation of an optimal tariff is a principal challenge for pricing actuaries. In this contribution we are concerned with the renewal insurance business discussing various mathematical aspects of calculation of an optimal renewal tariff.…
Two general algorithms based on opportunity costs are given for approximating a revenue-maximizing set of bids an auctioneer should accept, in a combinatorial auction in which each bidder offers a price for some subset of the available…
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.…
The goal of this paper is to share our experience in designing and organizing educational competitions with anonymous and (near) real-time leaderboards in both academic and industrial settings. While such competitions serve as a great…
We formulate selecting the best optimizing system (SBOS) problems and provide solutions for those problems. In an SBOS problem, a finite number of systems are contenders. Inside each system, a continuous decision variable affects the…
We study a game between $N$ job applicants who incur a cost $c$ (relative to the job value) to reveal their type during interviews and an administrator who seeks to maximize the probability of hiring the best. We define a full learning…
We study optimal transport for stationary stochastic processes taking values in finite spaces. In order to reflect the stationarity of the underlying processes, we restrict attention to stationary couplings, also known as joinings. The…
We study problems with stochastic uncertainty information on intervals for which the precise value can be queried by paying a cost. The goal is to devise an adaptive decision tree to find a correct solution to the problem in consideration…
We demonstrate that the set of cost distributions under which the optimal strategy for maximizing compliance (or more generally, effort) in a binary choice environment is identical to the optimal strategy for maximizing the accuracy of the…
Sir, We write as senior scientists about a problem vital to the scientific enterprise and prosperity. Nowadays, funding is a lengthy and complex business. First, universities themselves must approve all proposals for submission. Funding…
Real-time bidding (RTB) has become a major paradigm of display advertising. Each ad impression generated from a user visit is auctioned in real time, where demand-side platform (DSP) automatically provides bid price usually relying on the…
We consider the problem of choosing the best of $n$ samples, out of a large random pool, when the sampling of each member is associated with a certain cost. The quality (worth) of the best sample clearly increases with $n$, but so do the…
We investigate constrained optimal control problems for linear stochastic dynamical systems evolving in discrete time. We consider minimization of an expected value cost over a finite horizon. Hard constraints are introduced first, and then…
Institutions can provide incentives to increase cooperation behaviour in a population where this behaviour is infrequent. This process is costly, and it is thus important to optimize the overall spending. This problem can be mathematically…
We consider the design of experiments to evaluate treatments that are administered by self-interested agents, each seeking to achieve the highest evaluation and win the experiment. For example, in an advertising experiment, a company wishes…
Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…
Stochastic two-player games model systems with an environment that is both adversarial and stochastic. The adversarial part of the environment is modeled by a player (Player 2) who tries to prevent the system (Player 1) from achieving its…
Given a finite collection of stochastic alternatives, we study the problem of sequentially allocating a fixed sampling budget to identify the optimal alternative with a high probability, where the optimal alternative is defined as the one…
In many applications, ads are displayed together with the prices, so as to provide a direct comparison among similar products or services. The price-displaying feature not only influences the consumers' decisions, but also affects the…
In this paper, we study a game with positive or plus infinite expectation and determine the optimal proportion of investment for maximizing the limit expectation of growth rate per attempt. With this objective, we introduce a new pricing…