Related papers: Difference prophet inequalities for [0,1]-valued i…
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…
Prophet inequalities are a central object of study in optimal stopping theory. A gambler is sent values in an online fashion, sampled from an instance of independent distributions, in an adversarial, random or selected order, depending on…
We study threshold testing, an elementary probing model with the goal to choose a large value out of $n$ i.i.d. random variables. An algorithm can test each variable $X_i$ once for some threshold $t_i$, and the test returns binary feedback…
Prophet inequalities bound the expected reward that can be obtained in a stopping problem by the optimal reward of its corresponding off-line version. We propose a systematic technique for deriving prophet inequalities for stopping problems…
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…
The setting of the classic prophet inequality is as follows: a gambler is shown the probability distributions of $n$ independent, non-negative random variables with finite expectations. In their indexed order, a value is drawn from each…
For a sequence $\{X_{n}, \, n \geqslant 1 \}$ of random variables satisfying $\mathbb{E} \lvert X_{n} \rvert < \infty$ for all $n \geqslant 1$, a maximal inequality is established, and used to obtain strong law of large numbers for…
In this work, we consider two sets of dependent variables $\{X_{1},\ldots,X_{n}\}$ and $\{Y_{1},\ldots,Y_{n}\}$, where $X_{i}\sim EW(\alpha_{i},\lambda_{i},k_{i})$ and $Y_{i}\sim EW(\beta_{i},\mu_{i},l_{i})$, for $i=1,\ldots, n$, which are…
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,…
In this work we initiate the study of buy-and-sell prophet inequalities. We start by considering what is arguably the most fundamental setting. In this setting the online algorithm observes a sequence of prices one after the other. At each…
In this article we derive the best possible upper bound for $E[\max{X_i}-\min_i{X_i}]$ under given means and variances on $n$ random variables $X_i$. The random vector $(X_1,...,X_n)$ is allowed to have any dependence structure, provided $E…
In this work, we study the single-choice prophet inequality problem, where a gambler faces a sequence of~$n$ online i.i.d. random variables drawn from an unknown distribution. When a variable reveals its value, the gambler needs to decide…
We 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…
In this paper, we consider multistopping problems for finite discrete time sequences $X_1,...,X_n$. $m$-stops are allowed and the aim is to maximize the expected value of the best of these $m$ stops. The random variables are neither assumed…
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,…
We explore a prophet inequality problem, where the values of a sequence of items are drawn i.i.d. from some distribution, and an online decision maker must select one item irrevocably. We establish that $\mathrm{CR}_{\ell}$ the worst-case…
Given a sequence of random variables ${\bf X}=X_1,X_2,\ldots$ suppose the aim is to maximize one's return by picking a `favorable' $X_i$. Obviously, the expected payoff crucially depends on the information at hand. An optimally informed…
We show that there is a sharp threshold in dimension one for the transport cost between the Lebesgue measure $\lambda$ and an invariant random measure $\mu$ of unit intensity to be finite. We show that for \emph{any} such random measure the…
Competition complexity formalizes a compelling intuition: rather than refining the mechanism, how much additional competition is sufficient for a simple mechanism to compete with an optimal one? We begin the study of this question in…
In this paper, we survey literature on prophet inequalities for subadditive combinatorial auctions. We give an overview of the previous best $O(\log \log m)$ prophet inequality as well as the preceding $O(\log m)$ prophet inequality. Then,…