Related papers: Repeated Prophet Inequality with Near-optimal Boun…
Consider a gambler and a prophet who observe a sequence of independent, non-negative numbers. The gambler sees the numbers one-by-one whereas the prophet sees the entire sequence at once. The goal of both is to decide on fractions of each…
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…
Over the past two decades, significant strides have been made in stochastic problems such as revenue-optimal auction design and prophet inequalities, traditionally modeled with $n$ independent random variables to represent the values of $n$…
Imagine a large firm with multiple departments that plans a large recruitment. Candidates arrive one-by-one, and for each candidate the firm decides, based on her data (CV, skills, experience, etc), whether to summon her for an interview.…
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…
This paper considers a finite horizon optimal stopping problem for a sequence of independent and identically distributed random variables, where the objective is to design stopping rules that attempt to select the random variable with the…
In the single stock trading prophet problem formulated by Correa et al.\ (2023), an online algorithm observes a sequence of prices of a stock. At each step, the algorithm can either buy the stock by paying the current price if it doesn't…
We revisit three fundamental problems in algorithms under uncertainty: the Secretary Problem, Prophet Inequality, and Stochastic Probing, each subject to general downward-closed constraints. When elements have binary values, all three…
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…
Chance constrained program is computationally intractable due to the existence of chance constraints, which are randomly disturbed and should be satisfied with a probability. This paper proposes a two-layer randomized algorithm to address…
We provide prophet inequality algorithms for online weighted matching in general (non-bipartite) graphs, under two well-studied arrival models, namely edge arrival and vertex arrival. The weight of each edge is drawn independently from an…
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…
Hill and Kertz studied the prophet inequality on iid distributions [The Annals of Probability 1982]. They proved a theoretical bound of $1-\frac{1}{e}$ on the approximation factor of their algorithm. They conjectured that the best…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The study of the prophet inequality problem in the limited information regime was initiated by Azar et al. [SODA'14] in the pursuit of prior-independent posted-price mechanisms. As they show, $O(1)$-competitive policies are achievable using…