Related papers: Local hedging approximately solves Pandora's box p…
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…
Martin Weitzman's "Pandora's problem" furnishes the mathematical basis for optimal search theory in economics. Nearly 40 years later, Laura Doval introduced a version of the problem in which the searcher is not obligated to pay the cost of…
Pandora's problem is a fundamental model in economics that studies optimal search strategies under costly inspection. In this paper we initiate the study of Pandora's problem with combinatorial costs, capturing many real-life scenarios…
The Pandora's Box problem models the search for the best alternative when evaluation is costly. In the simplest variant, a decision maker is presented with $n$ boxes, each associated with a cost of inspection and a hidden random reward. The…
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…
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…
The Algorithm Selection Problem is concerned with selecting the best algorithm to solve a given problem on a case-by-case basis. It has become especially relevant in the last decade, as researchers are increasingly investigating how to…
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 give new approximation algorithms for the submodular joint replenishment problem and the inventory routing problem, using an iterative rounding approach. In both problems, we are given a set of $N$ items and a discrete time horizon of…
Designing recommendation systems with limited or no available training data remains a challenge. To that end, a new combinatorial optimization problem is formulated to generate optimized item selection for experimentation with the goal to…
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 present a local search framework to design and analyze both combinatorial algorithms and rounding algorithms for experimental design problems. This framework provides a unifying approach to match and improve all known results in…
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…
Motivated by the dynamic assortment offerings and item pricings occurring in e-commerce, we study a general problem of allocating finite inventories to heterogeneous customers arriving sequentially. We analyze this problem under the…
Visibility plays an important role for decision making in cluttered, uncertain environments. This paper considers the problem of identifying optimal hiding spots for an agent against line-of-sight detection by an adversary whose location is…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
We consider max-weighted matching with costs for learning the weights, modeled as a "Pandora's Box" on each endpoint of an edge. Each vertex has an initially-unknown value for being matched to a neighbor, and an algorithm must pay some cost…
Local Search is one of the fundamental approaches to combinatorial optimization and it is used throughout AI. Several local search algorithms are based on searching the k-exchange neighborhood. This is the set of solutions that can be…
Assortment optimization refers to the problem of designing a slate of products to offer potential customers, such as stocking the shelves in a convenience store. The price of each product is fixed in advance, and a probabilistic choice…