Related papers: Prophet Inequality from Samples: Is the More the M…
We continue the study of the performance for fixed-price mechanisms in the bilateral trade problem, and improve approximation ratios of welfare-optimal mechanisms in several settings. Specifically, in the case where only the buyer…
We study stochastic programs where the decision-maker cannot observe the distribution of the exogenous uncertainties but has access to a finite set of independent samples from this distribution. In this setting, the goal is to find a…
Makespan minimization on identical machines is a fundamental problem in online scheduling. The goal is to assign a sequence of jobs to $m$ identical parallel machines so as to minimize the maximum completion time of any job. Already in the…
In the classical secretary problem, $n$ ranked items arrive one by one, and each item's rank relative to its predecessors is noted. The observer must select or reject each item as it arrives, with the object of selecting the item of highest…
In a matroid secretary problem, one is presented with a sequence of objects of various weights in a random order, and must choose irrevocably to accept or reject each item. There is a further constraint that the set of items selected must…
In 2005 Li et al. gave a phi-competitive deterministic online algorithm for scheduling of packets with agreeable deadlines with a very interesting analysis. This is known to be optimal due to a lower bound by Hajek. We claim that the…
We consider the online stochastic matching problem proposed by Feldman et al. [FMMM09] as a model of display ad allocation. We are given a bipartite graph; one side of the graph corresponds to a fixed set of bins and the other side…
We present pricing mechanisms for several online resource allocation problems which obtain tight or nearly tight approximations to social welfare. In our settings, buyers arrive online and purchase bundles of items; buyers' values for the…
In the online random-arrival model, an algorithm receives a sequence of n requests that arrive in a random order. The algorithm is expected to make an irrevocable decision with regard to each request based only on the observed history. We…
We consider two variations of the classical secretary problem. * A variation of the returning secretary problem where each interviewee may appear a second time with a fixed probability p. The decision-maker observes interviewees…
In the subject of optimal stopping, the classical secretary problem is concerned with optimally selecting the best of $n$ candidates when their relative ranks are observed sequentially. This problem has been extended to optimally selecting…
We study a signaling game between two firms competing to have their product chosen by a principal. The products have qualities drawn i.i.d. from a common prior. The principal aims to choose the better product, but the quality of a product…
Major Internet advertising platforms offer budget pacing tools as a standard service for advertisers to manage their ad campaigns. Given the inherent non-stationarity in an advertiser's value and also competing advertisers' values over…
We consider the secretary problem through the lens of learning-augmented algorithms. As it is known that the best possible expected competitive ratio is $1/e$ in the classic setting without predictions, a natural goal is to design…
Sampling algorithms play a pivotal role in probabilistic AI. However, verifying if a sampler program indeed samples from the claimed distribution is a notoriously hard problem. Provably correct testers like Barbarik, Teq, Flash, CubeProbe…
The fundamental assignment problem is in search of welfare maximization mechanisms to allocate items to agents when the private preferences over indivisible items are provided by self-interested agents. The mainstream mechanism…
The problem of online matching with stochastic rewards is a generalization of the online bipartite matching problem where each edge has a probability of success. When a match is made it succeeds with the probability of the corresponding…
This note records a common threshold/surplus decomposition for single-threshold stopping rules in the classical prophet inequality. The same decomposition is used to certify several deterministic thresholds, including the median, half-mean,…
We study the problem of allocating divisible bads (chores) among multiple agents with additive utilities when monetary transfers are not allowed. The competitive rule is known for its remarkable fairness and efficiency properties in the…
Consider a storage area where arriving items are stored temporarily in bounded capacity stacks until their departure. We look into the problem of deciding where to put an arriving item with the objective of minimizing the maximum number of…