Related papers: Order Selection Prophet Inequality: From Threshold…
Makespan minimization on identical machines is a fundamental problem in online scheduling. The goal is to assign a sequence of jobs to $m$ identical parallel machines so as to minimize the maximum completion time of any job. Already in the…
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,…
We investigate the tradeoffs between fairness and efficiency when allocating indivisible items over time. Suppose T items arrive over time and must be allocated upon arrival, immediately and irrevocably, to one of n agents. Agent i assigns…
In the best choice problem with random arrivals, an unknown number $n$ of rankable items arrive at times sampled from the uniform distribution. As is well known, a real-time player can ensure stopping at the overall best item with…
We present pricing mechanisms for several online resource allocation problems which obtain tight or nearly tight approximations to social welfare. In our settings, buyers arrive online and purchase bundles of items; buyers' values for the…
We consider a problem wherein jobs arrive at random times and assume random values. Upon each job arrival, the decision-maker must decide immediately whether or not to accept the job and gain the value on offer as a reward, with the…
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…
We study the online stochastic matching problem. Against the offline benchmark, Feldman, Gravin, and Lucier (SODA 2015) designed an optimal $0.5$-competitive algorithm. A recent line of work, initiated by Papadimitriou, Pollner, Saberi, and…
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…
Consider a storage area where arriving items are stored temporarily in bounded capacity stacks until their departure. We look into the problem of deciding where to put an arriving item with the objective of minimizing the maximum number of…
We consider descending price auctions for selling $m$ units of a good to unit demand i.i.d. buyers where there is an exogenous bound of $k$ on the number of price levels the auction clock can take. The auctioneer's problem is to choose…
We study the online submodular maximization problem with free disposal under a matroid constraint. Elements from some ground set arrive one by one in rounds, and the algorithm maintains a feasible set that is independent in the underlying…
We study a signaling game between two firms competing to have their product chosen by a principal. The products have qualities drawn i.i.d. from a common prior. The principal aims to choose the better product, but the quality of a product…
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…
Consider a stream of $n$ random points (say, from the unit square) arriving one by one, where a player has to make an irreversible immediate decision for each arriving point whether to pick it. The player has to pick a single point, and the…
We study the online preemptive scheduling of intervals and jobs (with restarts). Each interval or job has an arrival time, a deadline, a length and a weight. The objective is to maximize the total weight of completed intervals or jobs.…
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…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
In the online sorting problem, we have an array $A$ of $n$ cells, and receive a stream of $n$ items $x_1,\dots,x_n\in [0,1]$. When an item arrives, we need to immediately and irrevocably place it into an empty cell. The goal is to minimize…
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…