Related papers: Prophet Inequality: Order selection beats random o…
We study generalizations of the "Prophet Inequality" and "Secretary Problem", where the algorithm is restricted to an arbitrary downward-closed set system. For {0,1}-values, we give O(log n)-competitive algorithms for both problems. This is…
We consider online variations of the Pandora's box problem (Weitzman. 1979), a standard model for understanding issues related to the cost of acquiring information for decision-making. Our problem generalizes both the classic Pandora's box…
Online load balancing for heterogeneous machines aims to minimize the makespan (maximum machine workload) by scheduling arriving jobs with varying sizes on different machines. In the adversarial setting, where an adversary chooses not only…
We consider the problem of allocating a set of divisible goods to $N$ agents in an online manner, aiming to maximize the Nash social welfare, a widely studied objective which provides a balance between fairness and efficiency. The goods…
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…
Correa et al. [EC' 2023] introduced the following trading prophets problem. A trader observes a sequence of stochastic prices for a stock, each drawn from a known distribution, and at each time must decide whether to buy or sell.…
Best-Fit is one of the most prominent and practically used algorithms for the bin packing problem, where a set of items with associated sizes needs to be packed in the minimum number of unit-capacity bins. Kenyon [SODA '96] studied online…
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…
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…
We study the problem of matching agents who arrive at a marketplace over time and leave after d time periods. Agents can only be matched while they are present in the marketplace. Each pair of agents can yield a different match value, and…
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…
For two matroids $\mathcal{M}_1$ and $\mathcal{M}_2$ defined on the same ground set $E$, the online matroid intersection problem is to design an algorithm that constructs a large common independent set in an online fashion. The algorithm is…
The knapsack problem is one of the classical problems in combinatorial optimization: Given a set of items, each specified by its size and profit, the goal is to find a maximum profit packing into a knapsack of bounded capacity. In the…
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…
The problem of online matching with stochastic rewards is a generalization of the online bipartite matching problem where each edge has a probability of success. When a match is made it succeeds with the probability of the corresponding…
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 online sorting problem, $n$ items are revealed one by one and have to be placed (immediately and irrevocably) into empty cells of a size-$n$ array. The goal is to minimize the sum of absolute differences between items in consecutive…
We study an online fair division problem where a fixed number of goods arrive sequentially and must be allocated to a given set of agents. Once a good arrives, its true value for each agent is revealed, and it has to be immediately and…
We extend the standard online worst-case model to accommodate past experience which is available to the online player in many practical scenarios. We do this by revealing a random sample of the adversarial input to the online player ahead…
We devise a general graph-theoretic framework for studying prophet inequalities. In this framework, an agent traverses a directed acyclic graph from a starting node $s$ to a target node $t$. Each edge has a value that is sampled from a…