Related papers: Some variations of the secretary problem
We consider the best-choice problem for independent (not necessarily iid) observations $X_1, \cdots, X_n$ with the aim of selecting the sample minimum. We show that in this full generality the monotone case of optimal stopping holds and the…
The conference peer review process involves three constituencies with different objectives: authors want their papers accepted at prestigious venues (and quickly), conferences want to present a program with many high-quality and few…
We discuss voting scenarios in which the set of voters (agents) and the set of alternatives are the same; that is, voters select a single representative from among themselves. Such a scenario happens, for instance, when a committee selects…
A decision maker repeatedly chooses one of a finite set of actions. In each period, the decision maker's payoff depends on fixed basic payoff of the chosen action and the frequency with which the action has been chosen in the past. We…
We explore the connection between an agent's decision problem and her ranking of information structures. We find that a finite amount of ordinal data on the agent's ranking of experiments is enough to identify her (finite) set of…
Sampling is a fundamental problem in computer science and statistics. However, for a given task and stream, it is often not possible to choose good sampling probabilities in advance. We derive a general framework for adaptively changing the…
We consider the possibility problem of determining if a document is a possible world of a probabilistic document, in the setting of probabilistic XML. This basic question is a special case of query answering or tree automata evaluation, but…
In this paper, we consider the case that sharing many secrets among a set of participants using the threshold schemes. All secrets are assumed to be statistically independent and the weak secure condition is focused on. Under such…
We study the classical discursive dilemma from the point of view of finding the best decision rule according to a quantitative criterion, under very mild restrictions on the set of admissible rules. The members of the deciding committee are…
We study a screening problem in which an agent privately observes a set of feasible technologies and can strategically disclose only a subset to the principal. The principal then takes an action whose payoff consequences for both players…
The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum,…
The classical Prophet Inequality arises from a fundamental problem in optimal-stopping theory. In this problem, a gambler sees a finite sequence of independent, non-negative random variables. If he stops the sequence at any time, he…
We consider the problem of sequential evaluation, in which an evaluator observes candidates in a sequence and assigns scores to these candidates in an online, irrevocable fashion. Motivated by the psychology literature that has studied…
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…
Street-level bureaucrats, such as caseworkers and border guards routinely face the dilemma of whether to follow rigid policy or exercise discretion based on professional judgement. However, frequent overrides threaten consistency and…
Contention resolution schemes have proven to be a useful and unifying abstraction for a variety of constrained optimization problems, in both offline and online arrival models. Much of prior work restricts attention to product distributions…
The task of learning to pick a single preferred example out a finite set of examples, an "optimal choice problem", is a supervised machine learning problem with complex, structured input. Problems of optimal choice emerge often in various…
The Stable Roommates problem involves matching a set of agents into pairs based on the agents' strict ordinal preference lists. The matching must be stable, meaning that no two agents strictly prefer each other to their assigned partners. A…
To make a joint decision, agents (or voters) are often required to provide their preferences as linear orders. To determine a winner, the given linear orders can be aggregated according to a voting protocol. However, in realistic settings,…
We consider the problem of creating assistants that can help agents solve new sequential decision problems, assuming the agent is not able to specify the reward function explicitly to the assistant. Instead of acting in place of the agent…