Matroid prophet inequalities and applications to multi-dimensional mechanism design

Robert Kleinberg and S. Matthew Weinberg

Games and Economic Behavior, 2019, vol. 113, issue C, 97-115

Abstract: Consider a gambler who observes a sequence of independent random numbers and is allowed to stop at any time, claiming reward equal to the most recent observation. The famous prophet inequality of Krengel, Sucheston, and Garling asserts that a gambler who knows the distribution of each random variable can achieve half as much reward, in expectation, as a “prophet” who knows the sampled values and can choose the largest one. We generalize this result to settings in which the gambler and the prophet are allowed to make multiple selections, subject to a matroid constraint, showing that the gambler can still achieve half as much reward as the prophet.

Keywords: Multi-dimensional mechanism design; Auction theory; Revenue; Online optimization; Stochastic optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D44 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825614001651
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:113:y:2019:i:c:p:97-115

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2014.11.002

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().