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Related papers: Prophet and Secretary at the Same Time

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We study secretary problems in settings with multiple agents. In the standard secretary problem, a sequence of arbitrary awards arrive online, in a random order, and a single decision maker makes an immediate and irrevocable decision…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Ron Kupfer

We study online secretary problems with returns in combinatorial packing domains with $n$ candidates that arrive sequentially over time in random order. The goal is to accept a feasible packing of candidates of maximum total value. In the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-02-06 Martin Hoefer , Lisa Wilhelmi

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-06-01 Melika Abolhasani , Soheil Ehsani , Hosein Esfandiari , MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi , Robert Kleinberg , Brendan Lucier

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Moran Feldman , Ola Svensson , Rico Zenklusen

There is a rising interest for studying the online benchmark as an alternative of the classical offline benchmark in online stochastic settings. Ezra, Feldman, Gravin, and Tang (SODA 2023) introduced the notion of order-competitive ratio,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Liyan Chen , Nuozhou Sun , Zhihao Gavin Tang

We study nonstationary newsvendor problems under nonparametric demand models and general distributional measures of nonstationarity, addressing the practical challenges of unknown degree of nonstationarity and demand censoring. We propose a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-24 Xin Chen , Jiameng Lyu , Shilin Yuan , Yuan Zhou

The well-known secretary problem in sequential analysis and optimal stopping theory asks one to maximize the probability of finding the optimal candidate in a sequentially examined list under the constraint that accept/reject decisions are…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2021-07-13 Xujun Liu , Olgica Milenkovic

In the uniformity testing task, an algorithm is provided with samples from an unknown probability distribution over a (known) finite domain, and must decide whether it is the uniform distribution, or, alternatively, if its total variation…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Guy Blanc , Clément L. Canonne , Erik Waingarten

We study the online metric matching problem. There are $m$ servers and $n$ requests located in a metric space, where all servers are available upfront and requests arrive one at a time. Upon the arrival of a new request, it needs to be…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Mingwei Yang , Sophie H. Yu

The Bayesian persuasion paradigm of strategic communication models interaction between a privately-informed agent, called the sender, and an ignorant but rational agent, called the receiver. The goal is typically to design a (near-)optimal…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Ronen Gradwohl , Niklas Hahn , Martin Hoefer , Rann Smorodinsky

Several well-studied online resource allocation problems can be formulated in terms of infinite, increasing sequences of positive values, in which each element is associated with a corresponding allocation value. Examples include problems…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Spyros Angelopoulos , Diogo Arsénio , Shahin Kamali

Stochastic optimization is a widely used approach for optimization under uncertainty, where uncertain input parameters are modeled by random variables. Exact or approximation algorithms have been obtained for several fundamental problems in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Arpit Agarwal , Rohan Ghuge , Viswanath Nagarajan , Zhengjia Zhuo

We consider a stochastic online problem where $n$ applicants arrive over time, one per time step. Upon arrival of each applicant their cost per time step is revealed, and we have to fix the duration of employment, starting immediately. This…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-05-31 Yann Disser , John Fearnley , Martin Gairing , Oliver Göbel , Max Klimm , Daniel Schmand , Alexander Skopalik , Andreas Tönnis

This paper studies an online trading variant of the classical secretary problem, called secretary problem variant trading (SPVT), from the perspective of an intermediary who facilitates trade between a seller and $n$ buyers (collectively…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-20 Xujin Chen , Xiaodong Hu , Changjun Wang , Yuchun Xiong , Qingjie Ye

We consider a parallel system of $m$ identical machines prone to unpredictable crashes and restarts, trying to cope with the continuous arrival of tasks to be executed. Tasks have different computational requirements (i.e., processing time…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2016-03-21 Elli Zavou , Antonio Fernández Anta

As a famous result, the ``37\% Law'' for Secretary Problem has widely influenced peoples' perception on online decision strategies about choice. However, using this strategy, too many attractive candidates may be rejected in the first 37\%,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-07-15 Zishuo Zhao

In online interval scheduling, the input is an online sequence of intervals, and the goal is to accept a maximum number of non-overlapping intervals. In the more general disjoint path allocation problem, the input is a sequence of requests,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Joan Boyar , Lene M. Favrholdt , Shahin Kamali , Kim S. Larsen

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 the online problem in which an intermediary trades identical items with a sequence of n buyers and n sellers, each of unit demand. We assume that the values of the traders are selected by an adversary and the sequence is…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Elias Koutsoupias , Philip Lazos

In this paper, we present a novel method for computing the asymptotic values of both the optimal threshold, and the probability of success in sequences of optimal stopping problems. This method, based on the resolution of a first-order…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-05-18 L. Bayón , P. Fortuny , J. M. Grau , A. M. Oller-Marcén , M. M. Ruiz