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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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Paul Dütting , Federico Fusco , Philip Lazos , Stefano Leonardi , Rebecca Reiffenhäuser

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-12-01 William Marshall , Nolan Miranda , Albert Zuo

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

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

Free order prophet inequalities bound the ratio between the expected value obtained by two parties each selecting a value from a set of independent random variables: a "prophet" who knows the value of each variable and may select the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Makis Arsenis , Odysseas Drosis , Robert Kleinberg

This paper considers a finite horizon optimal stopping problem for a sequence of independent and identically distributed random variables, where the objective is to design stopping rules that attempt to select the random variable with the…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-20 Alexander Goldenshluger , Yaakov Malinovsky , Assaf Zeevi

The Prophet Inequality and Pandora's Box problems are fundamental stochastic problem with applications in Mechanism Design, Online Algorithms, Stochastic Optimization, Optimal Stopping, and Operations Research. A usual assumption in these…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Khashayar Gatmiry , Thomas Kesselheim , Sahil Singla , Yifan Wang

The prophet inequality is one of the cornerstone problems in optimal stopping theory and has become a crucial tool for designing sequential algorithms in Bayesian settings. In the i.i.d. $k$-selection prophet inequality problem, we…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Johannes Brustle , Sebastian Perez-Salazar , Victor Verdugo

We develop a novel framework for costly information acquisition in which a decision-maker learns about an unobserved state by choosing a signal distribution, with the cost of information determined by the distribution of noise in the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-03-27 Peter Achim , Kemal Ozbek

In the classical prophet inequality settings, a gambler is given a sequence of $n$ random variables $X_1, \dots, X_n$, taken from known distributions, observes their values in this (potentially adversarial) order, and select one of them,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Sariel Har-Peled , Elfarouk Harb , Vasilis Livanos

We introduce a new measure for the performance of online algorithms in Bayesian settings, where the input is drawn from a known prior, but the realizations are revealed one-by-one in an online fashion. Our new measure is called…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-11-07 Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Nick Gravin , Zhihao Gavin Tang

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

We consider the problem of online allocation (matching, budgeted allocations, and assortments) of reusable resources where an adversarial sequence of resource requests is revealed over time and any allocated resource is used/rented for a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Vineet Goyal , Garud Iyengar , Rajan Udwani

We study single-sample prophet inequalities (SSPIs), i.e., prophet inequalities where only a single sample from each prior distribution is available. Besides a direct, and optimal, SSPI for the basic single choice problem [Rubinstein et…

We present pricing mechanisms for several online resource allocation problems which obtain tight or nearly tight approximations to social welfare. In our settings, buyers arrive online and purchase bundles of items; buyers' values for the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-07-16 Shuchi Chawla , J. Benjamin Miller , Yifeng Teng

We introduce a new decomposition technique for random variables that maps a generic instance of the prophet inequalities problem to a new instance where all but a constant number of variables have a tractable structure that we refer to as…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Allen Liu , Renato Paes Leme , Martin Pal , Jon Schneider , Balasubramanian Sivan

Despite having the same basic prophet inequality setup and model of loss aversion, conclusions in our multi-dimensional model differs considerably from the one-dimensional model of Kleinberg et al. For example, Kleinberg et al. gives a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Linda Cai , Joshua Gardner , S. Matthew Weinberg

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

We study the problem of online learning in adversarial bandit problems under a partial observability model called off-policy feedback. In this sequential decision making problem, the learner cannot directly observe its rewards, but instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Germano Gabbianelli , Matteo Papini , Gergely Neu

We consider the problem of online learning in the linear contextual bandits setting, but in which there are also strong individual fairness constraints governed by an unknown similarity metric. These constraints demand that we select…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-19 Stephen Gillen , Christopher Jung , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth