Related papers: Prophet Inequalities for Cost Minimization
Modeling and shaping how information spreads through a network is a major research topic in network analysis. While initially the focus has been mostly on efficiency, recently fairness criteria have been taken into account in this setting.…
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…
We consider prophet inequalities subject to feasibility constraints that are the intersection of $q$ matroids. The best-known algorithms achieve a $\Theta(q)$-approximation, even when restricted to instances that are the intersection of $q$…
Motivated by applications where a system must remain operational via continual procurement of contracts, we study two online contract selection problems under uncertain prices. At each time step, a price drawn from a known distribution is…
We study the online fair division problem, where indivisible goods arrive sequentially and must be allocated immediately and irrevocably. Prior work establishes strong impossibility results for approximating classic notions such as…
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…
We investigate prophet inequalities with competitive ratios approaching $1$, seeking to generalize $k$-uniform matroids. We first show that large girth does not suffice: for all $k$, there exists a matroid of girth $\geq k$ and a prophet…
We study the classic single-choice prophet secretary problem through a resource augmentation lens. Our goal is to bound the $(1-\epsilon)$-competition complexity for different classes of online algorithms. This metric asks for the smallest…
This paper studies the fundamental limits of availability and throughput for independent and heterogeneous demands of a limited resource. Availability is the probability that the demands are below the capacity of the resource. Throughput is…
Sellers in online markets face the challenge of determining the right time to sell in view of uncertain future offers. Classical stopping theory assumes that sellers have full knowledge of the value distributions, and leverage this…
We study revenue maximization in a buyer-seller setting where the seller has a single object and the buyer has both a private valuation and a private budget. Private budgets complicate the classic single-product monopoly problem, making…
We study a variation of the canonical online resource allocation problem in which resources are throughput, rather than budget, constrained. As in the classical setting, the decision-maker must assign sequentially arriving jobs to one of…
We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with a set of target states and every transition is associated with an integer cost. The optimization objective we study asks to minimize the expected total cost till the…
We investigate the role of commitment in optimal stopping by studying all the variants between Prophet Inequality (PI) and Pandora's Box (PB). Both problems deal with a set of variables drawn from known distributions. In PI the gambler…
Today mobile users such as drivers are invited by content providers (e.g., Tripadvisor) to sample fresh information of diverse paths to control the age of information (AoI). However, selfish drivers prefer to travel through the shortest…
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…
Prophet inequalities are a useful tool for designing online allocation procedures and comparing their performance to the optimal offline allocation. In the basic setting of $k$-unit prophet inequalities, the well-known procedure of Alaei…
We study the synthesis of a policy in a Markov decision process (MDP) following which an agent reaches a target state in the MDP while minimizing its total discounted cost. The problem combines a reachability criterion with a discounted…
We study a fundamental stochastic selection problem involving $n$ independent random variables, each of which can be queried at some cost. Given a tolerance level $\delta$, the goal is to find a value that is $\delta$-approximately minimum…
We present prior robust algorithms for a large class of resource allocation problems where requests arrive one-by-one (online), drawn independently from an unknown distribution at every step. We design a single algorithm that, for every…