English

The secretary problem on an unknown poset

Combinatorics 2012-06-29 v2 Probability

Abstract

We consider generalizations of the classical secretary problem, also known as the problem of optimal choice, to posets where the only information we have is the size of the poset and the number of maximal elements. We show that, given this information, there is an algorithm that is successful with probability at least 1e\frac{1}{e}. We conjecture that if there are kk maximal elements and k2k \geq 2 then this can be improved to 1kk1\sqrt[k-1]{\frac{1}{k}}, and prove this conjecture for posets of width kk. We also show that no better bound is possible.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1107.1379,
  title  = {The secretary problem on an unknown poset},
  author = {Bryn Garrod and Robert Morris},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1107.1379},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

21 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T18:33:29.106Z