Article ID: | iaor20127194 |
Volume: | 37 |
Issue: | 4 |
Start Page Number: | 559 |
End Page Number: | 573 |
Publication Date: | Nov 2012 |
Journal: | Mathematics of Operations Research |
Authors: | Saberi Amin, Manshadi Vahideh H, Gharan Shayan Oveis |
Keywords: | advertising, combinatorial optimization, simulation |
We consider the online stochastic matching problem proposed by Feldman et al. (2009) as a model of display ad allocation. We are given a bipartite graph; one side of the graph corresponds to a fixed set of bins, and the other side represents the set of possible ball types. At each time step, a ball is sampled independently from the given distribution and it needs to be matched upon its arrival to an empty bin. The goal is to maximize the number of allocations.We present an online algorithm for this problem with a competitive ratio of 0.702. Before our result, algorithms with a competitive ratio better than 1 − 1/