Related papers: Static Pricing for Single Sample Multi-unit Prophe…
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…
We study a variant of the single-choice prophet inequality problem where the decision-maker does not know the underlying distribution and has only access to a set of samples from the distributions. Rubinstein et al. [2020] showed that the…
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…
Selling a single item to $n$ self-interested buyers is a fundamental problem in economics, where the two objectives typically considered are welfare maximization and revenue maximization. Since the optimal mechanisms are often impractical…
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…
We consider a combinatorial auction setting where buyers have fractionally subadditive (XOS) valuations over the items and the seller's objective is to maximize the social welfare. A prophet inequality in this setting bounds the competitive…
In the prophet secretary problem, $n$ values are drawn independently from known distributions, and presented in a uniformly random order. A decision-maker must accept or reject each value when it is presented, and may accept at most $k$…
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…
Suppose a customer is faced with a sequence of fluctuating prices, such as for airfare or a product sold by a large online retailer. Given distributional information about what price they might face each day, how should they choose when to…
We consider the Item Pricing problem for revenue maximization in the limited supply setting, where a single seller with $n$ items caters to $m$ buyers with unknown subadditive valuation functions who arrive in a sequence. The seller sets…
We study the single-choice Prophet Inequality problem when the gambler is given access to samples. We show that the optimal competitive ratio of $1/2$ can be achieved with a single sample from each distribution. When the distributions are…
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…
Posted price mechanisms (PPM) constitute one of the predominant practices to price goods in online marketplaces and their revenue guarantees have been a central object of study in the last decade. We consider a basic setting where the…
We study prior-independent pricing for selling a single item to a single buyer when the seller observes only a single sample from the valuation distribution, while the buyer knows the distribution. Classical robust pricing approaches either…
We consider the problem of maximizing the expected revenue from selling $k$ homogeneous goods to $n$ unit-demand buyers who arrive sequentially with independent and identically distributed valuations. In this setting the optimal posted…
We take a unifying approach to single selection optimal stopping problems with random arrival order and independent sampling of items. In the problem we consider, a decision maker (DM) initially gets to sample each of $N$ items…
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…
In this work we initiate the study of buy-and-sell prophet inequalities. We start by considering what is arguably the most fundamental setting. In this setting the online algorithm observes a sequence of prices one after the other. At each…
Optimal stopping theory is a powerful tool for analyzing scenarios such as online auctions in which we generally require optimizing an objective function over the space of stopping rules for an allocation process under uncertainty. Perhaps…
We consider prophet inequalities for XOS and MPH-$k$ combinatorial auctions and give a simplified proof for the existence of static and anonymous item prices which recover the state-of-the-art competitive ratios. Our proofs make use of a…