1,139 research outputs found
Polymatroid Prophet Inequalities
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 number they want to keep so as to maximize the weighted
fractional sum of the numbers chosen.
The classic result of Krengel and Sucheston (1977-78) asserts that if both
the gambler and the prophet can pick one number, then the gambler can do at
least half as well as the prophet. Recently, Kleinberg and Weinberg (2012) have
generalized this result to settings where the numbers that can be chosen are
subject to a matroid constraint.
In this note we go one step further and show that the bound carries over to
settings where the fractions that can be chosen are subject to a polymatroid
constraint. This bound is tight as it is already tight for the simple setting
where the gambler and the prophet can pick only one number. An interesting
application of our result is in mechanism design, where it leads to improved
results for various problems
Prophet Secretary for Combinatorial Auctions and Matroids
The secretary and the prophet inequality problems are central to the field of
Stopping Theory. Recently, there has been a lot of work in generalizing these
models to multiple items because of their applications in mechanism design. The
most important of these generalizations are to matroids and to combinatorial
auctions (extends bipartite matching). Kleinberg-Weinberg \cite{KW-STOC12} and
Feldman et al. \cite{feldman2015combinatorial} show that for adversarial
arrival order of random variables the optimal prophet inequalities give a
-approximation. For many settings, however, it's conceivable that the
arrival order is chosen uniformly at random, akin to the secretary problem. For
such a random arrival model, we improve upon the -approximation and obtain
-approximation prophet inequalities for both matroids and
combinatorial auctions. This also gives improvements to the results of Yan
\cite{yan2011mechanism} and Esfandiari et al. \cite{esfandiari2015prophet} who
worked in the special cases where we can fully control the arrival order or
when there is only a single item.
Our techniques are threshold based. We convert our discrete problem into a
continuous setting and then give a generic template on how to dynamically
adjust these thresholds to lower bound the expected total welfare.Comment: Preliminary version appeared in SODA 2018. This version improves the
writeup on Fixed-Threshold algorithm
Comparing Different Information Levels
Given a sequence of random variables suppose the aim
is to maximize one's return by picking a `favorable' . Obviously, the
expected payoff crucially depends on the information at hand. An optimally
informed person knows all the values and thus receives . We will compare this return to the expected payoffs of a number of
observers having less information, in particular , the value of
the sequence to a person who only knows the first moments of the random
variables.
In general, there is a stochastic environment (i.e. a class of random
variables ), and several levels of information. Given some , an observer possessing information obtains . We
are going to study `information sets' of the form
characterizing the advantage of relative to . Since such a set measures
the additional payoff by virtue of increased information, its analysis yields a
number of interesting results, in particular `prophet-type' inequalities.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure
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