Professor Pieter Allaart invites you to attend the PhD dissertation defense of Andrew Allen

"A Random Walk Version of Robbins' Problem"

Abstract:

Robbins' problem is an optimal stopping problem where one seeks to minimize the expected rank of their observations among all observations. We examine random walk analogs to Robbins' problem in both discrete and continuous time. In discrete time, we consider full information and relative ranks versions of this problem. For three step walks, we give the optimal stopping rule and the expected rank for both versions. We also give asymptotic upper bounds for the expected rank in discrete time. Finally, we give upper and lower bounds for the expected rank in continuous time, and we show that the expected rank in the continuous time problem is at least as large as the normalized asymptotic expected rank in the full information discrete time version.