Related papers: Planning Against a Prophet: A Graph-Theoretic Fram…
Competition complexity formalizes a compelling intuition: rather than refining the mechanism, how much additional competition is sufficient for a simple mechanism to compete with an optimal one? We begin the study of this question in…
Prophet inequalities are a central object of study in optimal stopping theory. A gambler is sent values in an online fashion, sampled from an instance of independent distributions, in an adversarial, random or selected order, depending on…
The I.I.D. Prophet Inequality is a fundamental problem where, given $n$ independent random variables $X_1,\dots,X_n$ drawn from a known distribution $\mathcal{D}$, one has to decide at every step $i$ whether to stop and accept $X_i$ or…
We consider the problem of selling perishable items to a stream of buyers in order to maximize social welfare. A seller starts with a set of identical items, and each arriving buyer wants any one item, and has a valuation drawn i.i.d. from…
Prophet inequality concerns a basic optimal stopping problem and states that simple threshold stopping policies -- i.e., accepting the first reward larger than a certain threshold -- can achieve tight $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation to the…
Consider a gambler who observes a sequence of independent, non-negative random numbers and is allowed to stop the sequence at any time, claiming a reward equal to the most recent observation. The famous prophet inequality of Krengel,…
We introduce a variant of the classic prophet inequality, called \emph{residual prophet inequality} (RPI). In the RPI problem, we consider a finite sequence of $n$ nonnegative independent random values with known distributions, and a known…
We study the problem of Envy-Free Incomplete Connected Fair Division, where exactly p vertices of an undirected graph must be allocated to agents such that each agent receives a connected share and does not envy another agent's share.…
Prophet inequalities are fundamental optimal stopping problems, where a decision-maker observes sequentially items with values sampled independently from known distributions, and must decide at each new observation to either stop and gain…
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 study the classic single-choice prophet inequality problem through a resource augmentation lens. Our goal is to bound the $(1-\varepsilon)$-competition complexity of different types of online algorithms. This metric asks for the smallest…
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…
We consider the task of allocating indivisible items to agents, when the agents' preferences over the items are identical. The preferences are captured by means of a directed acyclic graph, with vertices representing items and an edge…
The classical house allocation problem involves assigning $n$ houses (or items) to $n$ agents according to their preferences. A key criterion in such problems is satisfying some fairness constraints such as envy-freeness. We consider a…
We consider prophet inequalities under downward-closed constraints. In this problem, a decision-maker makes immediate and irrevocable choices on arriving elements, subject to constraints. Traditionally, performance is compared to the…
In the standard model of fair allocation of resources to agents, every agent has some utility for every resource, and the goal is to assign resources to agents so that the agents' welfare is maximized. Motivated by job scheduling, interest…
We initiate the study of the prophet inequality problem through the resource augmentation framework in scenarios when the values of the rewards are correlated. Our goal is to determine the number of additional rewards an online algorithm…
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 our problem, we are given access to a number of sequences of nonnegative i.i.d. random variables, whose realizations are observed sequentially. All sequences are of the same finite length. The goal is to pick one element from each…
We consider a dynamic model for competition in a social network, where two strategic agents have fixed beliefs and the non-strategic/regular agents adjust their states according to a distributed consensus protocol. We suppose that one…