Related papers: The Competition Complexity of Prophet Inequalities
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…
In the online metric bipartite matching problem, we are given a set $S$ of server locations in a metric space. Requests arrive one at a time, and on its arrival, we need to immediately and irrevocably match it to a server at a cost which is…
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…
In this paper, we study the weighted $k$-server problem on the uniform metric in both the offline and online settings. We start with the offline setting. In contrast to the (unweighted) $k$-server problem which has a polynomial-time…
Ranking algorithms are deployed widely to order a set of items in applications such as search engines, news feeds, and recommendation systems. Recent studies, however, have shown that, left unchecked, the output of ranking algorithms can…
Online bipartite matching has been extensively studied. In the unweighted setting, Karp et al. gave an optimal $(1 - 1/e)$-competitive randomized algorithm. In the weighted setting, optimal algorithms have been achieved only under…
In the setting of online algorithms, the input is initially not present but rather arrive one-by-one over time and after each input, the algorithm has to make a decision. Depending on the formulation of the problem, the algorithm might be…
We consider the online bipartite matching problem on $(k,d)$-bounded graphs, where each online vertex has at most $d$ neighbors, each offline vertex has at least $k$ neighbors, and $k\geq d\geq 2$. The model of $(k,d)$-bounded graphs is…
We study three classical online problems -- $k$-server, $k$-taxi, and chasing size $k$ sets -- through a lens of smoothed analysis. Our setting allows request locations to be adversarial up to small perturbations, interpolating between…
We improve the best known competitive ratio (from 1/4 to 1/2), for the online multi-unit allocation problem, where the objective is to maximize the single-price revenue. Moreover, the competitive ratio of our algorithm tends to 1, as the…
Suppose that $n$ items arrive online in random order and the goal is to select $k$ of them such that the expected sum of the selected items is maximized. The decision for any item is irrevocable and must be made on arrival without knowing…
We study the classical, randomized Ranking algorithm which is known to be $(1 - \frac{1}{e})$-competitive in expectation for the Online Bipartite Matching Problem. We give a tail inequality bound, namely that Ranking is $(1 - \frac{1}{e} -…
The bounded delay buffer management problem, which was proposed by Kesselman et~al.\ (STOC 2001 and SIAM Journal on Computing 33(3), 2004), is an online problem focusing on buffer management of a switch supporting Quality of Service (QoS).…
Several well-studied online resource allocation problems can be formulated in terms of infinite, increasing sequences of positive values, in which each element is associated with a corresponding allocation value. Examples include problems…
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…
A central object in optimal stopping theory is the single-choice prophet inequality for independent, identically distributed random variables: Given a sequence of random variables $X_1,\dots,X_n$ drawn independently from a distribution $F$,…
We introduce a new decomposition technique for random variables that maps a generic instance of the prophet inequalities problem to a new instance where all but a constant number of variables have a tractable structure that we refer to as…
This paper studies an online optimal resource reservation problem in communication networks with job transfers where the goal is to minimize the reservation cost while maintaining the blocking cost under a certain budget limit. To tackle…
A basic combinatorial online resource allocation problem is considered, where multiple servers have individual capacity constraints, and at each time slot, a set of jobs arrives, that have potentially different weights to different servers.…
When designing a preemptive online algorithm for the maximum matching problem, we wish to maintain a valid matching M while edges of the underlying graph are presented one after the other. When presented with an edge e, the algorithm should…