Related papers: Pandora's Box Problem With Time Constraints
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…
The Pandora's Box Problem, originally formalized by Weitzman in 1979, models selection from set of random, alternative options, when evaluation is costly. This includes, for example, the problem of hiring a skilled worker, where only one…
Pandora's Box is a fundamental stochastic optimization problem, where the decision-maker must find a good alternative while minimizing the search cost of exploring the value of each alternative. In the original formulation, it is assumed…
The Pandora's box problem (Weitzman 1979) is a core model in economic theory that captures an agent's (Pandora's) search for the best alternative (box). We study an important generalization of the problem where the agent can either fully…
Weitzman introduced Pandora's box problem as a mathematical model of sequential search with inspection costs, in which a searcher is allowed to select a prize from one of $n$ alternatives. Several decades later, Doval introduced a close…
Weitzman (1979) introduced the Pandora Box problem as a model for sequential search with inspection costs, and gave an elegant index-based policy that attains provably optimal expected payoff. In various scenarios, the searching agent may…
In 1979, Weitzman introduced Pandora's box problem as a framework for sequential search with costly inspections. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in Pandora's box problem, particularly among researchers working at the…
In a classic model analysed by Weitzman an agent is presented with boxes containing prizes. She may open boxes in any order, discover prizes within, and optimally stop. She wishes to maximize the expected value of the greatest prize found,…
Pandora's Box is a central problem in decision making under uncertainty that can model various real life scenarios. In this problem we are given $n$ boxes, each with a fixed opening cost, and an unknown value drawn from a known…
We study a natural competitive-information-design strategic variant for the celebrated Pandora's Box problem (Weitzman, 1979), where each box is associated with a strategic information sender who can design what information about the box's…
This paper revisits the classic Pandora's box problem, studying a decision-maker (DM) who seeks to minimize her maximal ex-post regret. The DM decides how many options to explore and in what order, before choosing one or taking an outside…
The Pandora's Box problem and its extensions capture optimization problems with stochastic input where the algorithm can obtain instantiations of input random variables at some cost. To our knowledge, all previous work on this class of…
Large language model (LLM) generation often requires balancing output quality against inference cost, especially when using multiple generations. We introduce a new framework for inference-time optimization based on the classical Pandora's…
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…
We revisit the classic Pandora's Box (PB) problem under correlated distributions on the box values. Recent work of arXiv:1911.01632 obtained constant approximate algorithms for a restricted class of policies for the problem that visit boxes…
We study a natural application of contract design in the context of sequential exploration problems. In our principal-agent setting, a search task is delegated to an agent. The agent performs a sequential exploration of $n$ boxes, suffers…
Two central problems in Stochastic Optimization are Min Sum Set Cover and Pandora's Box. In Pandora's Box, we are presented with $n$ boxes, each containing an unknown value and the goal is to open the boxes in some order to minimize the sum…
We consider search problems with nonobligatory inspection and single-item or combinatorial selection. A decision maker is presented with a number of items, each of which contains an unknown price, and can pay an inspection cost to observe…
We investigate the role of inaccurate priors for the classical Pandora's box problem. In the classical Pandora's box problem we are given a set of boxes each with a known cost and an unknown value sampled from a known distribution. We…
In delegation problems, a principal does not have the resources necessary to complete a particular task, so they delegate the task to an untrusted agent whose interests may differ from their own. Given any family of such problems and space…