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arXiv · 2502.03574

Pandora with Inaccurate Priors

Kiarash Banihashem·Xiang Chen·MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi·Sungchul Kim·Kanak Mahadik·Ryan Rossi·Tong Yu
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Abstract

We investigate the role of inaccurate priors for the classical Pandora's box problem. In the classical Pandora's box problem we are given a set of boxes each with a known cost and an unknown value sampled from a known distribution. We investigate how inaccuracies in the beliefs can affect existing algorithms. Specifically, we assume that the knowledge of the underlying distribution has a small error in the Kolmogorov distance, and study how this affects the utility obtained by the optimal algorithm.

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Kiarash Banihashem, Xiang Chen, MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi, Sungchul Kim, Kanak Mahadik, Ryan Rossi, Tong Yu. 2025-02-05. Pandora with Inaccurate Priors. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03574

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