{"paper":{"title":"The Competition Complexity of Prophet Inequalities","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.DS"],"primary_cat":"cs.GT","authors_text":"Johannes Brustle, Jos\\'e Correa, Michal Feldman, Paul D\\\"utting, Tomer Ezra, Victor Verdugo","submitted_at":"2024-02-16T21:19:04Z","abstract_excerpt":"We study the classic single-choice prophet inequality problem through a resource augmentation lens. Our goal is to bound the $(1-\\varepsilon)$-competition complexity of different types of online algorithms. This metric asks for the smallest $k$ such that the expected value of the online algorithm on $k$ copies of the original instance, is at least a $(1-\\varepsilon)$-approximation to the expected offline optimum on a single copy.\n  We show that block threshold algorithms, which set one threshold per copy, are optimal and give a tight bound of $k = \\Theta(\\log \\log 1/\\varepsilon)$. This shows t"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2402.11084","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2402.11084/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}