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The Secretary Problem with Reservation Costs

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 13025))

Abstract

We introduce two variants of the secretary problem, where a reservation fee can be paid to keep candidates on a short-list instead of rejecting them on the spot. In the first model, the fee has to be paid only once and keeps the reservation forever. In the second model, the fee has to be paid in every round as long as the reservation is kept. We analyze the competitive ratio for both variants and present optimal, relatively simple strategies.

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Acknowledgement

We like to thank our anonymous referees for their useful comments that helped to improve the exposition of the paper.

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Correspondence to Matthias Gehnen .

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Burjons, E., Gehnen, M., Lotze, H., Mock, D., Rossmanith, P. (2021). The Secretary Problem with Reservation Costs. In: Chen, CY., Hon, WK., Hung, LJ., Lee, CW. (eds) Computing and Combinatorics. COCOON 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13025. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89543-3_46

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89543-3_46

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-89542-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-89543-3

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