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Related papers: Optimal Guarantees for Online Selection Over Time

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There is a rising interest for studying the online benchmark as an alternative of the classical offline benchmark in online stochastic settings. Ezra, Feldman, Gravin, and Tang (SODA 2023) introduced the notion of order-competitive ratio,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Liyan Chen , Nuozhou Sun , Zhihao Gavin Tang

In the classical prophet inequality settings, a gambler is given a sequence of $n$ random variables $X_1, \dots, X_n$, taken from known distributions, observes their values in this (potentially adversarial) order, and select one of them,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Sariel Har-Peled , Elfarouk Harb , Vasilis Livanos

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-10 Halil I. Bayrak , Mustafa Ç. Pınar , Rakesh Vohra

In the online 2-bounded auction problem, we have a collection of items represented as nodes in a graph and bundles of size two represented by edges. Agents are presented sequentially, each with a random weight function over the bundles. The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-17 José Soto , Victor Verdugo

In the adaptive ProbeMax problem, given a collection of mutually-independent random variables $X_1, \ldots, X_n$, our goal is to design an adaptive probing policy for sequentially sampling at most $k$ of these variables, with the objective…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Guillermo Gallego , Danny Segev

We introduce the \textit{prophet inequality with uncertain acceptance} model, in which a decision maker sequentially observes a sequence of independent options, each characterized by a value $x_i$ and an acceptance probability $p_i$, both…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Emile Martinez , Felipe Garrido-Lucero , Umberto Grandi , Sebastian Pérez-Salazar

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Jose Correa , Sebastian Perez-Salazar , Dana Pizarro , Bruno Ziliotto

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,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Zhihao Gavin Tang

We study the classic single-choice prophet secretary problem through a resource augmentation lens. Our goal is to bound the $(1-\epsilon)$-competition complexity for different classes of online algorithms. This metric asks for the smallest…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Tomer Ezra , Tamar Garbuz

We study single-sample prophet inequalities (SSPIs), i.e., prophet inequalities where only a single sample from each prior distribution is available. Besides a direct, and optimal, SSPI for the basic single choice problem [Rubinstein et…

The (Non-Preemptive) Throughput Maximization problem is a natural and fundamental scheduling problem. We are given $n$ jobs, where each job $j$ is characterized by a processing time and a time window, contained in a global interval $[0,T)$,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Alexander Armbruster , Fabrizio Grandoni , Antoine Tinguely , Andreas Wiese

In the classical optimal stopping problem, a player is given a sequence of random variables $X_1\ldots X_n$ with known distributions. After observing the realization of $X_i$, the player can either accept the observed reward from $X_i$ and…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2020-07-24 Shipra Agrawal , Jay Sethuraman , Xingyu Zhang

We consider the classical online bipartite matching problem in the probe-commit model. In this problem, when an online vertex arrives, its edges must be probed to determine if they exist, based on known edge probabilities. A probing…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Allan Borodin , Calum MacRury

Online advertising has motivated interest in online selection problems. Displaying ads to the right users benefits both the platform (e.g., via pay-per-click) and the advertisers (by increasing their reach). In practice, not all users click…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Sebastian Perez-Salazar , Mohit Singh , Alejandro Toriello

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,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2012-01-24 Robert Kleinberg , S. Matthew Weinberg

Motivated by the growing interest in correlation-robust stochastic optimization, we investigate stochastic selection problems beyond independence. Specifically, we consider the instructive case of pairwise-independent priors and matroid…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Shaddin Dughmi , Yusuf Hakan Kalayci , Neel Patel

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-12-31 Jack Wang

Matching is one of the most fundamental and broadly applicable problems across many domains. In these diverse real-world applications, there is often a degree of uncertainty in the input which has led to the study of stochastic matching…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Brian Brubach , Nathaniel Grammel , Will Ma , Calum MacRury , Aravind Srinivasan

Prophet inequalities and secretary problems have been extensively studied in recent years due to their elegance, connections to online algorithms, stochastic optimization, and mechanism design problems in game theoretic settings. Rubinstein…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-07-09 Chandra Chekuri , Vasilis Livanos

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-12-01 William Marshall , Nolan Miranda , Albert Zuo