Related papers: A combinatorial proof for the secretary problem wi…
We introduce a novel model of contracts with combinatorial actions that accounts for sequential and adaptive agent behavior. As in the standard model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly project to an agent. There are $n$…
Spreadsheets have grown up and became very powerful and easy to use tools in applying analytical techniques for solving business problems. Operations managers, production managers, planners and schedulers can work with them in developing…
Let us call a sequence of numbers heapable if they can be sequentially inserted to form a binary tree with the heap property, where each insertion subsequent to the first occurs at a leaf of the tree, i.e. below a previously placed number.…
Motivated by the success of the serial dictatorship mechanism in social choice settings, we explore its usefulness in tackling various combinatorial optimization problems. We do so by considering an abstract model, in which a set of agents…
We consider the online problem in which an intermediary trades identical items with a sequence of n buyers and n sellers, each of unit demand. We assume that the values of the traders are selected by an adversary and the sequence is…
We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…
When allocating indivisible items to agents, it is known that the only strategyproof mechanisms that satisfy a set of rather mild conditions are constrained serial dictatorships: given a fixed order over agents, at each step the designated…
Serial dictatorship is a simple mechanism for coordinating agents in solving combinatorial optimization problems according to their preferences. The most representative such problem is one-sided matching, in which a set of n agents have…
A sequential design problem for rank aggregation is commonly encountered in psychology, politics, marketing, sports, etc. In this problem, a decision maker is responsible for ranking $K$ items by sequentially collecting pairwise noisy…
Contention resolution schemes have proven to be a useful and unifying abstraction for a variety of constrained optimization problems, in both offline and online arrival models. Much of prior work restricts attention to product distributions…
In submodular $k$-secretary problem, the goal is to select $k$ items in a randomly ordered input so as to maximize the expected value of a given monotone submodular function on the set of selected items. In this paper, we introduce a…
We consider a generalization of the secretary problem where contracts are temporary, and for a fixed duration. This models online hiring of temporary employees, or online auctions for re-usable resources. The problem is related to the…
Large language models increasingly rely on explicit reasoning chains and can produce multiple plausible responses for a given context. We study the candidate sampler that produces the set of plausible responses contrasting the ancestral…
We study the set of incentive compatible and efficient two-sided matching mechanisms. We classify all such mechanisms under an additional assumption -- "gender-neutrality" -- which guarantees that the two sides be treated symmetrically. All…
This paper discusses the odds problem, proposed by Bruss in 2000, and its variants. A recurrence relation called a dynamic programming (DP) equation is used to find an optimal stopping policy of the odds problem and its variants. In 2013,…
In most social choice settings, the participating agents express their preferences over the different alternatives in the form of linear orderings. While this clearly simplifies preference elicitation, it inevitably leads to poor…
Motivated by online platforms such as job markets, we study an agent choosing from a list of candidates, each with a hidden quality that determines match value. The agent observes only a noisy ranking of the candidates plus a binary signal…
We explore the connection between an agent's decision problem and her ranking of information structures. We find that a finite amount of ordinal data on the agent's ranking of experiments is enough to identify her (finite) set of…
Constrained submodular maximization problems have long been studied, with near-optimal results known under a variety of constraints when the submodular function is monotone. The case of non-monotone submodular maximization is less…
In the combinatorial-action contract model (D\"utting et al., FOCS'21) a principal delegates the execution of a complex project to an agent, who can choose any subset from a given set of actions. Each set of actions incurs a cost to the…