Related papers: Threshold Rules for the Classical Prophet Inequali…
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…
This paper develops a geometric diagnostic framework for classical inequality decomposability. Representing the simplest nontrivial setting of three-person income distributions as points on the two-dimensional income-share simplex, we…
Prophet inequalities are fundamental optimal stopping problems, where a decision-maker observes sequentially items with values sampled independently from known distributions, and must decide at each new observation to either stop and gain…
In our problem, we are given access to a number of sequences of nonnegative i.i.d. random variables, whose realizations are observed sequentially. All sequences are of the same finite length. The goal is to pick one element from each…
Prophet inequality concerns a basic optimal stopping problem and states that simple threshold stopping policies -- i.e., accepting the first reward larger than a certain threshold -- can achieve tight $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation to the…
We present a general framework for stochastic online maximization problems with combinatorial feasibility constraints. The framework establishes prophet inequalities by constructing price-based online approximation algorithms, a natural…
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…
We introduce the \textit{prophet inequality with uncertain acceptance} model, in which a decision maker sequentially observes a sequence of independent options, each characterized by a value $x_i$ and an acceptance probability $p_i$, both…
Consider a gambler and a prophet who observe a sequence of independent, non-negative numbers. The gambler sees the numbers one-by-one whereas the prophet sees the entire sequence at once. The goal of both is to decide on fractions of each…
Prophet inequalities and secretary problems have been extensively studied in recent years due to their elegance, connections to online algorithms, stochastic optimization, and mechanism design problems in game theoretic settings. Rubinstein…
We study a continuous and infinite time horizon counterpart to the classic prophet inequality, which we term the stationary prophet inequality problem. Here, copies of a good arrive and perish according to Poisson point processes. Buyers…
In the classic prophet inequality, samples from independent random variables arrive online. A gambler that knows the distributions must decide at each point in time whether to stop and pick the current sample or to continue and lose that…
Consider a gambler who observes a sequence of independent, non-negative random numbers and is allowed to stop the sequence at any time, claiming a reward equal to the most recent observation. The famous prophet inequality of Krengel,…
In this work, we study the single-choice prophet inequality problem, where a gambler faces a sequence of~$n$ online i.i.d. random variables drawn from an unknown distribution. When a variable reveals its value, the gambler needs to decide…
We explore how the asymptotic structure of a random permutation of $[n]$ with $m$ inversions evolves, as $m$ increases, establishing thresholds for the appearance and disappearance of any classical, consecutive or vincular pattern. The…
We introduce a variant of the classic prophet inequality, called \emph{residual prophet inequality} (RPI). In the RPI problem, we consider a finite sequence of $n$ nonnegative independent random values with known distributions, and a known…
We introduce a model of competing agents in a prophet setting, where rewards arrive online, and decisions are made immediately and irrevocably. The rewards are unknown from the outset, but they are drawn from a known probability…
Many online problems are studied in stochastic settings for which inputs are samples from a known distribution, given in advance, or from an unknown distribution. Such distributions model both beyond-worst-case inputs and, when given,…
Relative entropy is the standard measure of distinguishability in classical and quantum information theory. In the classical case, its loss under channels admits an exact chain rule, while in the quantum case only asymptotic, regularized…
We introduce a new quantum decoder based on a variant of the pretty good measurement, but defined via an alternative matrix quotient. We use this decoder to show new lower bounds on the error exponent both in the one-shot and asymptotic…