Additively Competitive Secretaries

2026-02-13

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Online Learning & Bandits
• Search and Optimization: Algorithm Configuration
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness, privacy, and diversity in economic environments
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web learning to rank, online learning, and counterfactual learning for ranking
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Algorithms and analysis for incomplete, noisy, or partially observed Web-related graphs

Abstract

In the secretary problem, a set of secretary candidates arrive in a uniformly random order and reveal their values one by one. A company, who can only hire one candidate and hopes to maximize the expected value of its hire, needs to make irrevocable online decisions about whether to hire the current candidate. The classical framework of evaluating a policy is to compute its worst-case competitive ratio against the optimal solution in hindsight, and there the best policy -- the ``$1/e$ law''-- has a competitive ratio of $1/e$. We propose an alternative evaluation framework through the lens of regret -- the worst-case additive difference between the optimal hindsight solution and the expected performance of the policy, assuming that each value is normalized between $0$ and $1$. The $1/e$ law for the classical framework has a regret of $1 - 1/e \approx 0.632$; by contrast, we show that the class of ``pricing curves''algorithms can guarantee a regret of at most $1/4 = 0.25$ (which is tight within the class), and the class of ``best-only pricing curves''algorithms can guarantee a regret of at most $0.190$ (with a lower bound of $0.171$). In addition, we show that in general, no policy can give a regret guarantee better than $0.152$. Finally, we discuss other objectives in our regret-minimization framework, such as selecting the top-$k$ candidates for $k>1$, or maximizing revenue during the selection process.

Problem

• secretary problem
• regret minimization
• online decision making
• competitive ratio
• additive regret

Innovation

• secretary problem
• regret minimization
• pricing curves
• online algorithms
• competitive analysis