English
Related papers

Related papers: Prophet Inequalities for Cost Minimization

200 papers

We study the problem of multi-dimensional revenue maximization when selling $m$ items to a buyer that has additive valuations for them, drawn from a (possibly correlated) prior distribution. Unlike traditional Bayesian auction design, we…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-04-29 Yiannis Giannakopoulos , Diogo Poças , Alexandros Tsigonias-Dimitriadis

The common way to optimize auction and pricing systems is to set aside a small fraction of the traffic to run experiments. This leads to the question: how can we learn the most with the smallest amount of data? For truthful auctions, this…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-11-09 Renato Paes Leme , Balasubramanian Sivan , Yifeng Teng , Pratik Worah

This note records a common threshold/surplus decomposition for single-threshold stopping rules in the classical prophet inequality. The same decomposition is used to certify several deterministic thresholds, including the median, half-mean,…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-28 Jiechen Zhang

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Ronen Gradwohl , Niklas Hahn , Martin Hoefer , Rann Smorodinsky

Posted price mechanisms (PPM) constitute one of the predominant practices to price goods in online marketplaces and their revenue guarantees have been a central object of study in the last decade. We consider a basic setting where the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-24 José Correa , Dana Pizarro , Victor Verdugo

Numerous recent papers have studied the tension between thickening and clearing a market in (uncertain, online) long-time horizon Markovian settings. In particular, (Aouad and Sarita{\c{c}} EC'20, Collina et al. WINE'20, Kessel et al.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Neel Patel , David Wajc

We study the online metric matching problem. There are $m$ servers and $n$ requests located in a metric space, where all servers are available upfront and requests arrive one at a time. Upon the arrival of a new request, it needs to be…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Mingwei Yang , Sophie H. Yu

We study the optimal pricing strategy of a monopolist selling homogeneous goods to customers over multiple periods. The customers choose their time of purchase to maximize their payoff that depends on their valuation of the product, the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-06-28 Ali Makhdoumi , Azarakhsh Malekian , Asuman Ozdaglar

We study a contest in which $N$ players sequentially draw from a distribution as many times as they want at a fixed cost per draw, with no recall, and the highest accepted value wins a prize. In the unique symmetric equilibrium, the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-28 Emre Ozdenoren , Murat Erkurt

We provide a computationally efficient black-box reduction from mechanism design to algorithm design in very general settings. Specifically, we give an approximation-preserving reduction from truthfully maximizing \emph{any} objective under…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-05-20 Yang Cai , Constantinos Daskalakis , S. Matthew Weinberg

Let $P = \{p(i)\}$ be a measure of strictly positive probabilities on the set of nonnegative integers. Although the countable number of inputs prevents usage of the Huffman algorithm, there are nontrivial $P$ for which known methods find a…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-11-17 Michael B. Baer

We study policies aiming to minimize the weighted sum of completion times of jobs in the context of coordination mechanisms for selfish scheduling problems. Our goal is to design local policies that achieve a good price of anarchy in the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2010-12-23 Richard Cole , José R. Correa , Vasilis Gkatzelis , Vahab Mirrokni , Neil Olver

We study fair division of indivisible goods in a single-parameter environment. In particular, we develop truthful social welfare maximizing mechanisms for fairly allocating indivisible goods. Our fairness guarantees are in terms of solution…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Siddharth Barman , Ganesh Ghalme , Shweta Jain , Pooja Kulkarni , Shivika Narang

We study fair mechanisms for the classic job scheduling problem on unrelated machines with the objective of minimizing the makespan. This problem is equivalent to minimizing the egalitarian social cost in the fair division of chores. The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Michal Feldman , Jugal Garg , Vishnu V. Narayan , Tomasz Ponitka

We study online capacitated resource allocation, a natural generalization of online stochastic max-weight bipartite matching. This problem is motivated by ride-sharing and Internet advertising applications, where online arrivals may have…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Alexander Braun , Thomas Kesselheim , Tristan Pollner , Amin Saberi

We study the problem of designing mechanisms for \emph{information acquisition} scenarios. This setting models strategic interactions between an uniformed \emph{receiver} and a set of informed \emph{senders}. In our model the senders…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Federico Cacciamani , Matteo Castiglioni , Nicola Gatti

We consider the revenue maximization problem with sharp multi-demand, in which $m$ indivisible items have to be sold to $n$ potential buyers. Each buyer $i$ is interested in getting exactly $d_i$ items, and each item $j$ gives a benefit…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-12-16 Vittorio Bilò , Michele Flammini , Gianpiero Monaco

In this paper, we study the Maximum Profit Pick-up Problem with Time Windows and Capacity Constraint (MP-PPTWC). Our main results are 3 polynomial time algorithms, all having constant approximation factors. The first algorithm has an…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-12-06 Bogdan Armaselu , Ovidiu Daescu

We investigate the distributed online economic dispatch problem for power systems with time-varying coupled inequality constraints. The problem is formulated as a distributed online optimization problem in a multi-agent system. At each time…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-25 Yingjie Zhou , Xiaoqian Wang , Tao Li

We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-08-03 Moshe Babaioff , Nicole Immorlica , Brendan Lucier , S. Matthew Weinberg