Prophet Secretary: Surpassing the 1-1/e Barrier

In the Prophet Secretary problem, samples from a known set of probability distributions arrive one by one in a uniformly random order, and an algorithm must irrevocably pick one of the samples as soon as it arrives. The goal is to maximize the expected value of the sample picked relative to the expected maximum of the distributions. This is one of the most simple and fundamental problems in online decision making that models the process selling one item to a sequence of costumers. For a closely related problem called the Prophet Inequality where the order of the random variables is adversarial, it is known that one can achieve in expectation 1/2 of the expected maximum, and no better ratio is possible. For the Prophet Secretary problem, that is, when the variables arrive in a random order, Esfandiari et al. (ESA 2015) showed that one can actually get 1-1/e of the maximum. The 1-1/e bound was recently extended to more general settings (Ehsani et al., 2017). Given these results, one might be tempted to believe that 1-1/e is the correct bound. We show that this is not the case by providing an algorithm for the Prophet Secretary problem that beats the 1-1/e bound and achieves 1-1/e+1/400 of the optimum value. We also prove a hardness result on the performance of algorithms under a natural restriction which we call deterministic distribution-insensitivity.