Making Commitments in the Face of Uncertainty: How to Pick a Winner Almost Every Time (Extended Abstract) (1996)
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BibTeX
@MISC{Awerbuch96makingcommitments,
author = {Baruch Awerbuch and Yossi Azar and Tom Leighton},
title = {Making Commitments in the Face of Uncertainty: How to Pick a Winner Almost Every Time (Extended Abstract)},
year = {1996}
}
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Abstract
In this paper, we formulate and provide optimal solutions for a broad class of problems in which a decision-maker is required to select from among numerous competing options. The goal of the decision-maker is to select the option that will have the best future performance. This task is made difficult by the constraint that the decision-maker has no way to predict the future performance of any of the options. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that the decision-maker can still (at least in several important scenarios) pick a winner with high probability. Our result has several applications. For example, consider the problem of scheduling background jobs on a network of workstations (NOW) when very little is known about the future speed or availability of each workstation. In this problem, the goal is to schedule each job on a workstation which will have enough idle capacity to complete the job within a reasonable or ...
