Related papers: The Competition Complexity of Prophet Inequalities
In the Prophet Secretary problem, samples from a known set of probability distributions arrive one by one in a uniformly random order, and an algorithm must irrevocably pick one of the samples as soon as it arrives. The goal is to maximize…
Prophet inequalities are performance guarantees for online algorithms (a.k.a. stopping rules) solving the following "hiring problem": a decision maker sequentially inspects candidates whose values are independent random numbers and is asked…
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.…
We present prior robust algorithms for a large class of resource allocation problems where requests arrive one-by-one (online), drawn independently from an unknown distribution at every step. We design a single algorithm that, for every…
Due to their numerous applications, in particular in Mechanism Design, Prophet Inequalities have experienced a surge of interest. They describe competitive ratios for basic stopping time problems where random variables get revealed…
Most of the literature on online algorithms in revenue management focuses on settings with irrevocable decisions, where once a decision is made upon the arrival of a new input, it cannot be canceled later. Motivated by modern applications…
We investigate prophet inequalities with competitive ratios approaching $1$, seeking to generalize $k$-uniform matroids. We first show that large girth does not suffice: for all $k$, there exists a matroid of girth $\geq k$ and a prophet…
We consider the online stochastic matching problem for bipartite graphs where edges adjacent to an online node must be probed to determine if they exist, based on known edge probabilities. Our algorithms respect commitment, in that if a…
We study a wholesale supply chain ordering problem. In this problem, the supplier has an initial stock, and faces an unpredictable stream of incoming orders, making real-time decisions on whether to accept or reject each order. What makes…
Many online problems are studied in stochastic settings for which inputs are samples from a known distribution, given in advance, or from an unknown distribution. Such distributions model both beyond-worst-case inputs and, when given,…
In Bayesian online settings, every element has a value that is drawn from a known underlying distribution, which we refer to as the element's identity. The elements arrive sequentially. Upon the arrival of an element, its value is revealed,…
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…
Due to numerous applications in retail and (online) advertising the problem of assortment selection has been widely studied under many combinations of discrete choice models and feasibility constraints. In many situations, however, an…
We study a continuous and infinite time horizon counterpart to the classic prophet inequality, which we term the stationary prophet inequality problem. Here, copies of a good arrive and perish according to Poisson point processes. Buyers…
Prophet inequalities bound the expected reward that can be obtained in a stopping problem by the optimal reward of its corresponding off-line version. We propose a systematic technique for deriving prophet inequalities for stopping problems…
We consider an online multi-weighted generalization of several classic online optimization problems, called the online combinatorial assignment problem. We are given an independence system over a ground set of elements and agents that…
We study the single-choice Prophet Inequality problem when the gambler is given access to samples. We show that the optimal competitive ratio of $1/2$ can be achieved with a single sample from each distribution. When the distributions are…
The prophet inequalities problem has received significant study over the past decades and has several applications such as to online auctions. In this paper, we study two variants of the i.i.d. prophet inequalities problem, namely the…
In the classical prophet inequality, a gambler observes a sequence of stochastic rewards $V_1,...,V_n$ and must decide, for each reward $V_i$, whether to keep it and stop the game or to forfeit the reward forever and reveal the next value…
We consider the classical online scheduling problem P||C_{max} in which jobs are released over list and provide a nearly optimal online algorithm. More precisely, an online algorithm whose competitive ratio is at most (1+\epsilon) times…