Strategies for Sequential Search and Selection in Real Time

Strategies for Sequential Search and Selection in Real Time Synopsis

This volume contains the proceedings of the MS-IMS-SIAM Joint Summer Research Conference on Strategies for Sequential Search and Selection in Real Time, held in June 1990 at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The conference focused on problems related to sequential observation of random variables and selection of actions in real time. Forty-seven researchers from twelve countries attended the conference. The eighteen papers collected here span four broad topics. The first five papers deal with selection problems in which the reward or cost depends on the observations only through their ranks; such problems have come to be called secretary problems. The next group of papers focuses on sequential search, bandit problems, and scheduling. These are followed by four papers on multicriteria and competitive problems, and the volume ends with four papers on prophet inequalities, records, and extreme values. Aimed at graduate students and researchers in mathematics and statistics, this book will provide readers with a feeling for the breadth and depth of contemporary research in these areas.