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We study matroid prophet inequalities when distributions are unknown and accessible only through samples. While single-sample prophet inequalities for special matroids are known, no constant-factor competitive algorithm with even a…
We investigate non-adaptive algorithms for matroid prophet inequalities. Matroid prophet inequalities have been considered resolved since 2012 when [KW12] introduced thresholds that guarantee a tight 2-approximation to the prophet; however,…
Competition complexity formalizes a compelling intuition: rather than refining the mechanism, how much additional competition is sufficient for a simple mechanism to compete with an optimal one? We begin the study of this question in…
We study the classic single-choice prophet inequality problem through a resource augmentation lens. Our goal is to bound the $(1-\varepsilon)$-competition complexity of different types of online algorithms. This metric asks for the smallest…
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…
We explore a prophet inequality problem, where the values of a sequence of items are drawn i.i.d. from some distribution, and an online decision maker must select one item irrevocably. We establish that $\mathrm{CR}_{\ell}$ the worst-case…
Hill and Kertz studied the prophet inequality on iid distributions [The Annals of Probability 1982]. They proved a theoretical bound of $1-\frac{1}{e}$ on the approximation factor of their algorithm. They conjectured that the best…
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,…
We consider the matroid prophet inequality problem. This problem has been extensively studied in the case of adaptive mechanisms. In particular, there is a tight $2$-competitive mechanism for all matroids. However, it is not known what…
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…
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…
We study the prophet inequality when the gambler has an access only to a single sample from each distribution. Rubinstein, Wang and Weinberg showed that an optimal guarantee of 1/2 can be achieved when the underlying matroid has rank 1,…
Numerous recent papers have studied the tension between thickening and clearing a market in (uncertain, online) long-time horizon Markovian settings. In particular, (Aouad and Sarita{\c{c}} EC'20, Collina et al. WINE'20, Kessel et al.…
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…
We consider the prophet inequality problem for (not necessarily bipartite) matching problems with independent edge values, under both edge arrivals and vertex arrivals. We show constant-factor prophet inequalities for the case where the…
We provide a simple $(1-O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{k}}))$-selectable Online Contention Resolution Scheme for $k$-uniform matroids against a fixed-order adversary. If $A_i$ and $G_i$ denote the set of selected elements and the set of realized active…
Prophet inequalities compare online stopping strategies against an omniscient "prophet" using distributional knowledge. In this work, we augment this model with a conservative prediction of the maximum realized value. We quantify 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…
Due to their numerous applications, in particular in Mechanism Design, Prophet Inequalities have experienced a surge of interest. They describe competitive ratios for basic stopping time problems where random variables get revealed…
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…