online decision-making

Online Fair Allocation of Perishable Resources

We consider a practically motivated variant of the canonical online fair allocation problem: a decision-maker has a budget of perishable resources to allocate over a fixed number of rounds. Each round sees a random number of arrivals, and the …

Erratum to “Online Allocation and Pricing: Constant Regret via Bellman Inequalities”

Theorem 3 of Vera et al. (2021) states a constant regret result for a menu-pricing problem. This erratum preserves theorem 3 but revises its proof and adds a uniqueness requirement. The revision has implications also for the assortment problem in …

Water-Filling is Universally Minimax Optimal

Allocation of dynamically-arriving (i.e., online) divisible resources among a set of offline agents is a fundamental problem, with applications to online marketplaces, scheduling, portfolio selection, signal processing, and many other areas. The …

Robust Resource Allocation via Competitive Subsidies

A canonical setting for non-monetary online resource allocation is one where agents compete over multiple rounds for a single item per round, with i.i.d. valuations and additive utilities across rounds. With n symmetric agents, a natural benchmark …

Robust equilibria in shared resource allocation via strengthening Border's theorem

We consider repeated allocation of a shared resource via a non-monetary mechanism, wherein a single item must be allocated to one of multiple agents in each round. We assume that each agent has i.i.d. values for the item across rounds, and additive …

Sequential Fair Allocation With Replenishments: A Little Envy Goes An Exponentially Long Way

We study the trade-off between envy and inefficiency in repeated resource allocation settings with stochastic replenishments, motivated by real-world systems such as food banks and medical supply chains. Specifically, we consider a model in which a …

Dynamic Allocation of Public Goods with Approximate Core Equilibria

We consider the problem of repeatedly allocating multiple shareable public goods that have limited availability in an online setting without the use of money. In our setting, agents have additive values, and the value each agent receives from getting …

Beyond Worst-Case Online Allocation via Dynamic Max-min Fairness

We study the allocation of shared resources over multiple rounds among competing agents, via the dynamic max-min fair (DMMF) mechanism: the good in each round is allocated to the requesting agent with the least number of allocations received to date. …

Allocating Public Goods via Dynamic Max-Min Fairness: Long-Run Behavior and Competitive Equilibria

Dynamic max-min fair allocation (DMMF) is a simple and popular mechanism for the repeated allocation of a shared resource among competing agents: in each round, each agent can choose to request or not for the resource, which is then allocated to the …

Good prophets know when the end is near

We consider a class of online decision-making problems with exchangeable actions, where in each period a controller is presented an input type drawn from some stochastic arrival process. The controller must choose an action, and the final objective …