Combinatorial Stationary Prophet Inequalities

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Patel, Neel, Wajc, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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_version_ 1866913201801658368
author Patel, Neel
Wajc, David
author_facet Patel, Neel
Wajc, David
contents Numerous recent papers have studied the tension between thickening and clearing a market in (uncertain, online) long-time horizon Markovian settings. In particular, (Aouad and Sarita{ç} EC'20, Collina et al. WINE'20, Kessel et al. EC'22) studied what the latter referred to as the Stationary Prophet Inequality Problem, due to its similarity to the classic finite-time horizon prophet inequality problem. These works all consider unit-demand buyers. Mirroring the long line of work on the classic prophet inequality problem subject to combinatorial constraints, we initiate the study of the stationary prophet inequality problem subject to combinatorially-constrained buyers. Our results can be summarized succinctly as unearthing an algorithmic connection between contention resolution schemes (CRS) and stationary prophet inequalities. While the classic prophet inequality problem has a tight connection to online CRS (Feldman et al. SODA'16, Lee and Singla ESA'18), we show that for the stationary prophet inequality problem, offline CRS play a similarly central role. We show that, up to small constant factors, the best (ex-ante) competitive ratio achievable for the combinatorial prophet inequality equals the best possible balancedness achievable by offline CRS for the same combinatorial constraints.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_08245
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Combinatorial Stationary Prophet Inequalities
Patel, Neel
Wajc, David
Computer Science and Game Theory
Data Structures and Algorithms
Numerous recent papers have studied the tension between thickening and clearing a market in (uncertain, online) long-time horizon Markovian settings. In particular, (Aouad and Sarita{ç} EC'20, Collina et al. WINE'20, Kessel et al. EC'22) studied what the latter referred to as the Stationary Prophet Inequality Problem, due to its similarity to the classic finite-time horizon prophet inequality problem. These works all consider unit-demand buyers. Mirroring the long line of work on the classic prophet inequality problem subject to combinatorial constraints, we initiate the study of the stationary prophet inequality problem subject to combinatorially-constrained buyers. Our results can be summarized succinctly as unearthing an algorithmic connection between contention resolution schemes (CRS) and stationary prophet inequalities. While the classic prophet inequality problem has a tight connection to online CRS (Feldman et al. SODA'16, Lee and Singla ESA'18), we show that for the stationary prophet inequality problem, offline CRS play a similarly central role. We show that, up to small constant factors, the best (ex-ante) competitive ratio achievable for the combinatorial prophet inequality equals the best possible balancedness achievable by offline CRS for the same combinatorial constraints.
title Combinatorial Stationary Prophet Inequalities
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.08245