Related papers: The Role of Commitment in Optimal Stopping
We introduce a model of sender-receiver stopping games, where the state of the world follows an iid--process throughout the game. At each period, the sender observes the current state, and sends a message to the receiver, suggesting either…
We consider how an agent should update her uncertainty when it is represented by a set P of probability distributions and the agent observes that a random variable X takes on value x, given that the agent makes decisions using the minimax…
In several standard models of dynamic programming (gambling houses, MDPs, POMDPs), we prove the existence of a very robust notion of value for the infinitely repeated problem, namely the pathwise uniform value. This solves two open…
We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme -- called contract -- in order to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. We consider a…
We investigate an optimal stopping problem for the expected value of a discounted payoff on a regime-switching geometric Brownian motion under two constraints on the possible stopping times: only at exogenous random times and only during a…
We consider an atomic congestion game in which each player $i$ participates in the game with an exogenous and known probability $p_{i}\in(0,1]$, independently of everybody else, or stays out and incurs no cost. We compute the parameterized…
Selection problems with costly information, dating back to Weitzman's Pandora's Box problem, have received much attention recently. We study the general model of Costly Information Combinatorial Selection (CICS) that was recently introduced…
We consider stopping problems in which a decision maker (DM) faces an unknown state of nature and decides sequentially whether to stop and take an irreversible action; pay a fee and obtain additional information; or wait without acquiring…
We study threshold testing, an elementary probing model with the goal to choose a large value out of $n$ i.i.d. random variables. An algorithm can test each variable $X_i$ once for some threshold $t_i$, and the test returns binary feedback…
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…
We consider the classical question of predicting binary sequences and study the {\em optimal} algorithms for obtaining the best possible regret and payoff functions for this problem. The question turns out to be also equivalent to the…
We study the canonical signaling game, endowing the sender with commitment power: before learning the state, sender designs a strategy, which maps the state into a probability distribution over actions. We provide a geometric…
In cooperative multiagent planning, it can often be beneficial for an agent to make commitments about aspects of its behavior to others, allowing them in turn to plan their own behaviors without taking the agent's detailed behavior into…
We study the classic problem of prediction with expert advice under bandit feedback. Our model assumes that one action, corresponding to the learner's abstention from play, has no reward or loss on every trial. We propose the CBA algorithm,…
We study the prophet secretary problem, a well-studied variant of the classic prophet inequality, where values are drawn from independent known distributions but arrive in uniformly random order. Upon seeing a value at each step, the…
We study the modelling and valuation of surrender and other behavioural options in life insurance and pension. We place ourselves in between the two extremes of completely arbitrary intervention and optimal intervention by the policyholder.…
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 study online selection problems in both the prophet and secretary settings, when arriving agents have interdependent values. In the interdependent values model, introduced in the seminal work of Milgrom and Weber [1982], each agent has a…
Various algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL) exhibit dramatic variation in their convergence rates as a function of problem structure. Such problem-dependent behavior is not captured by worst-case analyses and has accordingly inspired…
We study finite normal-form games in which payoffs are subject to random perturbations and players face uncertainty about how these shocks co-move across actions, an ambiguity that naturally arises when only realized (not counterfactual)…