Related papers: Planning Against a Prophet: A Graph-Theoretic Fram…
We consider prophet inequalities in a setting where agents correspond to both elements in a matroid and vertices in a graph. A set of agents is feasible if they form both an independent set in the matroid and an independent set in the…
We consider the prophet inequality problem for (not necessarily bipartite) matching problems with independent edge values, under both edge arrivals and vertex arrivals. We show constant-factor prophet inequalities for the case where the…
The classical Prophet Inequality arises from a fundamental problem in optimal-stopping theory. In this problem, a gambler sees a finite sequence of independent, non-negative random variables. If he stops the sequence at any time, he…
In a classical online decision problem, a decision-maker who is trying to maximize her value inspects a sequence of arriving items to learn their values (drawn from known distributions), and decides when to stop the process by taking the…
In this paper, we introduce an over-time variant of the well-known prophet inequality with i.i.d. random variables. Instead of stopping with one realized value at some point in the process, we decide for each step how long we select the…
We present a general framework for stochastic online maximization problems with combinatorial feasibility constraints. The framework establishes prophet inequalities by constructing price-based online approximation algorithms, a natural…
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…
In online sales, sellers usually offer each potential buyer a posted price in a take-it-or-leave fashion. Buyers can sometimes see posted prices faced by other buyers, and changing the price frequently could be considered unfair. The…
We introduce a model of competing agents in a prophet setting, where rewards arrive online, and decisions are made immediately and irrevocably. The rewards are unknown from the outset, but they are drawn from a known probability…
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…
In this work, we study the single-choice prophet inequality problem, where a gambler faces a sequence of~$n$ online i.i.d. random variables drawn from an unknown distribution. When a variable reveals its value, the gambler needs to decide…
In a prophet inequality problem, $n$ independent random variables are presented to a gambler one by one. The gambler decides when to stop the sequence and obtains the most recent value as reward. We evaluate a stopping rule by the…
Prophet inequalities for rewards maximization are fundamental to optimal stopping theory with extensive applications to mechanism design and online optimization. We study the \emph{cost minimization} counterpart of the classical prophet…
We study a pricing problem where a seller has $k$ identical copies of a product, buyers arrive sequentially, and the seller prices the items aiming to maximize social welfare. When $k=1$, this is the so called "prophet inequality" problem…
A prophet inequality states, for some $\alpha\in[0,1]$, that the expected value achievable by a gambler who sequentially observes random variables $X_1,\dots,X_n$ and selects one of them is at least an $\alpha$ fraction of the maximum value…
The setting of the classic prophet inequality is as follows: a gambler is shown the probability distributions of $n$ independent, non-negative random variables with finite expectations. In their indexed order, a value is drawn from each…
Prophet inequalities compare online stopping strategies against an omniscient "prophet" using distributional knowledge. In this work, we augment this model with a conservative prediction of the maximum realized value. We quantify the…
We study the prophet inequality, a fundamental problem in online decision-making and optimal stopping, in a practical setting where rewards are observed only through noisy realizations and reward distributions are unknown. At each stage,…
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…