Related papers: The secretary problem with biased arrival order vi…
We consider two variants of the secretary problem, the\emph{ Best-or-Worst} and the \emph{Postdoc} problems, which are closely related. First, we prove that both variants, in their standard form with binary payoff 1 or 0, share the same…
In this work, we study the single-choice prophet inequality problem, where a gambler faces a sequence of~$n$ online i.i.d. random variables drawn from an unknown distribution. When a variable reveals its value, the gambler needs to decide…
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…
Babaioff et al. [BIK2007] introduced the matroid secretary problem in 2007, a natural extension of the classic single-choice secretary problem to matroids, and conjectured that a constant-competitive online algorithm exists. The conjecture…
This paper answers a long-standing open question concerning the $1/e$-strategy for the problem of best choice. $N$ candidates for a job arrive at times independently uniformly distributed in $[0,1]$. The interviewer knows how each candidate…
The Bayesian persuasion paradigm of strategic communication models interaction between a privately-informed agent, called the sender, and an ignorant but rational agent, called the receiver. The goal is typically to design a (near-)optimal…
Consider a hiring process with candidates coming from different universities. It is easy to order candidates with the same background, yet it can be challenging to compare them otherwise. The latter case requires additional costly…
The prophet and secretary problems demonstrate online scenarios involving the optimal stopping theory. In a typical prophet or secretary problem, selection decisions are assumed to be immediate and irrevocable. However, many online settings…
The sequential allocation protocol is a simple and popular mechanism to allocate indivisible goods, in which the agents take turns to pick the items according to a predefined sequence. While this protocol is not strategy-proof, it has been…
One way to interpret the classical secretary problem (CSP) is to consider it as a special case of the following problem. We observe $n$ independent indicator variables $I_1,I_2,\dotsc,I_n$ sequentially and we try to stop on the last…
We study the matroid secretary problems with submodular valuation functions. In these problems, the elements arrive in random order. When one element arrives, we have to make an immediate and irrevocable decision on whether to accept it or…
We study a version of the classical Cayley-Moser optimal stopping problem, in which a seller must sell an asset by a given deadline, with the offers, which are independent random variables with a known distribution, arriving at random…
This paper studies an online trading variant of the classical secretary problem, called secretary problem variant trading (SPVT), from the perspective of an intermediary who facilitates trade between a seller and $n$ buyers (collectively…
We study the House Allocation problem (also known as the Assignment problem), i.e., the problem of allocating a set of objects among a set of agents, where each agent has ordinal preferences (possibly involving ties) over a subset of the…
We use various combinatorial and probabilistic techniques to study growth rates for the probability that a random permutation from the Mallows distribution avoids consecutive patterns. The Mallows distribution behaves like a $q$-analogue of…
We initiate the work on maximin share (MMS) fair allocation of m indivisible chores to n agents using only their ordinal preferences, from both algorithmic and mechanism design perspectives. The previous best-known approximation is 2-1/n by…
The fundamental assignment problem is in search of welfare maximization mechanisms to allocate items to agents when the private preferences over indivisible items are provided by self-interested agents. The mainstream mechanism…
Ranking algorithms are deployed widely to order a set of items in applications such as search engines, news feeds, and recommendation systems. Recent studies, however, have shown that, left unchecked, the output of ranking algorithms can…
We solve a sequential decision-making problem under uncertainty that takes into account the failure probability of a task. This problem cannot be handled by the stochastic shortest path problem, which is the standard model for sequential…