Hiring Secretaries over Time: The Benefit of Concurrent Employment

TL;DR

This paper presents an online algorithm for hiring secretaries over time to minimize costs, demonstrating competitive ratios under various conditions and proving the necessity of concurrent employment for competitiveness.

Contribution

It introduces a competitive online algorithm for a stochastic hiring problem and establishes bounds showing the importance of allowing concurrent employment.

Findings

Achieves a competitive ratio of 2.965 for uniform distributions.

Provides lower bounds of 2 (analytical) and 2.148 (computational).

Shows no competitive algorithm exists without concurrent employment.

Abstract

We consider a stochastic online problem where $n$ applicants arrive over time, one per time step. Upon arrival of each applicant their cost per time step is revealed, and we have to fix the duration of employment, starting immediately. This decision is irrevocable, i.e., we can neither extend a contract nor dismiss a candidate once hired. In every time step, at least one candidate needs to be under contract, and our goal is to minimize the total hiring cost, which is the sum of the applicants' costs multiplied with their respective employment durations. We provide a competitive online algorithm for the case that the applicants' costs are drawn independently from a known distribution. Specifically, the algorithm achieves a competitive ratio of 2.965 for the case of uniform distributions. For this case, we give an analytical lower bound of 2 and a computational lower bound of 2.148. We then adapt our algorithm to stay competitive even in settings with one or more of the following restrictions: (i) at most two applicants can be hired concurrently; (ii) the distribution of the applicants' costs is unknown; (iii) the total number $n$ of time steps is unknown. On the other hand, we show that concurrent employment is a necessary feature of competitive algorithms by proving that no algorithm has a competitive ratio better than $\Omega(\sqrt{n} / \log n)$ if concurrent employment is forbidden.