Related papers: Prophet Inequalities for Cost Minimization
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…
In this paper, we survey literature on prophet inequalities for subadditive combinatorial auctions. We give an overview of the previous best $O(\log \log m)$ prophet inequality as well as the preceding $O(\log m)$ prophet inequality. Then,…
In the online 2-bounded auction problem, we have a collection of items represented as nodes in a graph and bundles of size two represented by edges. Agents are presented sequentially, each with a random weight function over the bundles. The…
We study single-sample prophet inequalities (SSPIs), i.e., prophet inequalities where only a single sample from each prior distribution is available. Besides a direct, and optimal, SSPI for the basic single choice problem [Rubinstein et…
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…
Online allocation problems with resource constraints have a rich history in operations research. In this paper, we introduce the \emph{regularized online allocation problem}, a variant that includes a non-linear regularizer acting on the…
We consider an optimal stopping problem with n correlated offers where the goal is to design a (randomized) stopping strategy that maximizes the expected value of the offer in the sequence at which we stop. Instead of assuming to know the…
We study a fundamental problem in optimization under uncertainty. There are $n$ boxes; each box $i$ contains a hidden reward $x_i$. Rewards are drawn i.i.d. from an unknown distribution $\mathcal{D}$. For each box $i$, we see $y_i$, an…
Let X_1,X_2,... be a sequence of [0,1]-valued i.i.d. random variables, let c\geq 0 be a sampling cost for each observation and let Y_i=X_i-ic, i=1,2,.... For n=1,2,..., let M(Y_1,...,Y_n)=E(max_{1\leq i\leq n}Y_i) and…
We provide a near-optimal, computationally efficient algorithm for the unit-demand pricing problem, where a seller wants to price n items to optimize revenue against a unit-demand buyer whose values for the items are independently drawn…
We study the repeated optimal stopping problem, in which the same optimal stopping instance with an unknown distribution is solved repeatedly over $T$ rounds. We aim to simultaneously achieve strong per-round performance guarantees relative…
In this work, we study a scenario where a publisher seeks to maximize its total revenue across two sales channels: guaranteed contracts that promise to deliver a certain number of impressions to the advertisers, and spot demands through an…
We study online selection problems in both the prophet and secretary settings, when arriving agents have interdependent values. In the interdependent values model, introduced in the seminal work of Milgrom and Weber [1982], each agent has a…
We study matroid prophet inequalities when distributions are unknown and accessible only through samples. While single-sample prophet inequalities for special matroids are known, no constant-factor competitive algorithm with even a…
We consider a practically motivated variant of the canonical online fair allocation problem: a decision-maker has a budget of perishable resources to allocate over a fixed number of rounds. Each round sees a random number of arrivals, and…
Prophet inequalities and secretary problems have been extensively studied in recent years due to their elegance, connections to online algorithms, stochastic optimization, and mechanism design problems in game theoretic settings. Rubinstein…
There is a rising interest for studying the online benchmark as an alternative of the classical offline benchmark in online stochastic settings. Ezra, Feldman, Gravin, and Tang (SODA 2023) introduced the notion of order-competitive ratio,…
This work introduces \emph{sharding} and \emph{Poissonization} as a unified framework for analyzing prophet inequalities. Sharding involves splitting a random variable into several independent random variables, shards, that collectively…
The Prophet Inequality and Pandora's Box problems are fundamental stochastic problem with applications in Mechanism Design, Online Algorithms, Stochastic Optimization, Optimal Stopping, and Operations Research. A usual assumption in these…
We study a class of Bayesian online selection problems with matroid constraints. Consider a vendor who has several items to sell, with the set of sold items being subject to some structural constraints, e.g., the set of sold items should be…