Related papers: A combinatorial proof for the secretary problem wi…
Optimal stopping theory is a powerful tool for analyzing scenarios such as online auctions in which we generally require optimizing an objective function over the space of stopping rules for an allocation process under uncertainty. Perhaps…
The secretary and the prophet inequality problems are central to the field of Stopping Theory. Recently, there has been a lot of work in generalizing these models to multiple items because of their applications in mechanism design. The most…
We consider generalizations of the classical secretary problem, also known as the problem of optimal choice, to posets where the only information we have is the size of the poset and the number of maximal elements. We show that, given this…
As a famous result, the ``37\% Law'' for Secretary Problem has widely influenced peoples' perception on online decision strategies about choice. However, using this strategy, too many attractive candidates may be rejected in the first 37\%,…
We treat a version of the multiple-choice secretary problem called the multiple-choice duration problem, in which the objective is to maximize the time of possession of relatively best objects. It is shown that, for the $m$--choice duration…
We study online secretary problems with returns in combinatorial packing domains with $n$ candidates that arrive sequentially over time in random order. The goal is to accept a feasible packing of candidates of maximum total value. In the…
Consider a hiring process with candidates coming from different universities. It is easy to order candidates with the same background, yet it can be challenging to compare them otherwise. The latter case requires additional costly…
We revisit the problem of selecting an item from $n$ choices that appear before us in random sequential order so as to minimize the expected rank of the item selected. In particular, we examine the stopping rule where we reject the first…
We consider a stochastic online problem where $n$ applicants arrive over time, one per time step. Upon arrival of each applicant their cost per time step is revealed, and we have to fix the duration of employment, starting immediately. This…
We study a variant of the secretary problem where candidates come from independent, not necessarily identical distributions known to us, and show that we can do at least as well as in the IID setting. This resolves a conjecture of…
Online advertising has motivated interest in online selection problems. Displaying ads to the right users benefits both the platform (e.g., via pay-per-click) and the advertisers (by increasing their reach). In practice, not all users click…
We solve the secretary problem in the case that the ranked items arrive in a statistically biased order rather than in uniformly random order. The bias is given by a Mallows distribution with parameter $q\in(0,1)$, so that higher ranked…
For $2\le k\in\mathbb{N}$, consider the following adaptation of the classical secretary problem. There are $k$ items at each of $n$ linearly ordered ranks. The $kn$ items are revealed, one item at a time, in a uniformly random order, to an…
We study various generalizations of the secretary problem with submodular objective functions. Generally, a set of requests is revealed step-by-step to an algorithm in random order. For each request, one option has to be selected so as to…
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 define a new selection problem, \emph{Selecting with History}, which extends the secretary problem to a setting with historical information. We propose a strategy for this problem and calculate its success probability in the limit of a…
The game of best choice (or "secretary problem") is a model for making an irrevocable decision among a fixed number of candidate choices that are presented sequentially in random order, one at a time. Because the classically optimal…
A version of the secretary problem called the duration problem, in which the objective is to maximize the time of possession of relatively best objects or the second best, is treated. It is shown that in this duration problem there are…
We study a variation of the game of best choice (also known as the secretary problem or game of googol) under an additional assumption that the ranks of interview candidates are restricted using permutation pattern-avoidance. We develop…
The \emph{Temp Secretary Problem} was recently introduced by Fiat et al. It is a generalization of the Secretary Problem, in which commitments are temporary for a fixed duration. We present a simple online algorithm with improved…