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Most of the literature on online algorithms in revenue management focuses on settings with irrevocable decisions, where once a decision is made upon the arrival of a new input, it cannot be canceled later. Motivated by modern applications…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Farbod Ekbatani , Rad Niazadeh , Pranav Nuti , Jan Vondrak

Candidates arrive sequentially for an interview process which results in them being ranked relative to their predecessors. Based on the ranks available at each time, one must develop a decision mechanism that selects or dismisses the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-05-08 George V. Moustakides , Xujun Liu , Olgica Milenkovic

Prophet inequalities consist of many beautiful statements that establish tight performance ratios between online and offline allocation algorithms. Typically, tightness is established by constructing an algorithmic guarantee and a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Jiashuo Jiang , Will Ma , Jiawei Zhang

We study the prophet inequality, a fundamental problem in online decision-making and optimal stopping, in a practical setting where rewards are observed only through noisy realizations and reward distributions are unknown. At each stage,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-03 Jung-hun Kim , Vianney Perchet

Prophet inequalities are performance guarantees for online algorithms (a.k.a. stopping rules) solving the following "hiring problem": a decision maker sequentially inspects candidates whose values are independent random numbers and is asked…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-05-23 Makis Arsenis , Robert Kleinberg

Algorithms with predictions is a recent framework for decision-making under uncertainty that leverages the power of machine-learned predictions without making any assumption about their quality. The goal in this framework is for algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Eric Balkanski , Will Ma , Andreas Maggiori

Prophet inequalities are a cornerstone in optimal stopping and online decision-making. Traditionally, they involve the sequential observation of $n$ non-negative independent random variables and face irrevocable accept-or-reject choices.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Sebastian Perez-Salazar , Victor Verdugo

In the "secretary problem", well-known in the theory of optimal stopping, an employer is about to interview a maximum of N secretaries about which she has no prior information. Chow et al. proved that with an optimal strategy the expected…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Kimmo Eriksson , Jonas Sjostrand , Pontus Strimling

We consider an optimal stopping problem with n correlated offers where the goal is to design a (randomized) stopping strategy that maximizes the expected value of the offer in the sequence at which we stop. Instead of assuming to know the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-08 Pieter Kleer , Daan Noordenbos

In the Prophet Secretary problem, samples from a known set of probability distributions arrive one by one in a uniformly random order, and an algorithm must irrevocably pick one of the samples as soon as it arrives. The goal is to maximize…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-11-07 Yossi Azar , Ashish Chiplunkar , Haim Kaplan

An unconventional approach for optimal stopping under model ambiguity is introduced. Besides ambiguity itself, we take into account how ambiguity-averse an agent is. This inclusion of ambiguity attitude, via an $\alpha$-maxmin nonlinear…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2021-07-15 Yu-Jui Huang , Xiang Yu

The secretary problem has been a focus of extensive study with a variety of extensions that offer useful insights into the theory of optimal stopping. The original solution is to set one stopping threshold that gives rise to an immediately…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-02-08 Roberto Brera , Feng Fu

For many online problems, it is known that the uniform arrival order enables the design of algorithms with much better performance guarantees than under worst-case. The quintessential example is the secretary problem. If the sequence of…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-02-10 Thomas Kesselheim , Robert Kleinberg , Rad Niazadeh

The I.I.D. Prophet Inequality is a fundamental problem where, given $n$ independent random variables $X_1,\dots,X_n$ drawn from a known distribution $\mathcal{D}$, one has to decide at every step $i$ whether to stop and accept $X_i$ or…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Vasilis Livanos , Ruta Mehta

Prophet inequalities are a central object of study in optimal stopping theory. In the iid model, a gambler sees values in an online fashion, sampled independently from a given distribution. Upon observing each value, the gambler either…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Giordano Giambartolomei , Frederik Mallmann-Trenn , Raimundo Saona

We revisit three fundamental problems in algorithms under uncertainty: the Secretary Problem, Prophet Inequality, and Stochastic Probing, each subject to general downward-closed constraints. When elements have binary values, all three…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Aviad Rubinstein , Sahil Singla

The prophet secretary problem is a combination of the prophet inequality and the secretary problem, where elements are drawn from known independent distributions and arrive in uniformly random order. In this work, we design 1) a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Ziyun Chen , Zhiyi Huang , Dongchen Li , Zhihao Gavin Tang

The secretary problem is probably the purest model of decision making under uncertainty. In this paper we ask which advice can we give the algorithm to improve its success probability? We propose a general model that unifies a broad range…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-11-16 Paul Dütting , Silvio Lattanzi , Renato Paes Leme , Sergei Vassilvitskii

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-10-10 Hossein Esfandiari , MohammadTaghi HajiAghayi , Brendan Lucier , Michael Mitzenmacher

We study the i.i.d. $k$-selection prophet inequality problem, where a decision-maker sequentially observes $n$ independent nonnegative rewards and may accept at most $k$ of them without knowledge of future realizations. The objective is to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-24 Jieming Kong , Karthyek Murthy