An Asymptotic Analysis on Generalized Secretary Problem

Abstract

As a famous result, the ``37\% Law'' for Secretary Problem has widely influenced peoples' perception on online decision strategies about choice. However, using this strategy, too many attractive candidates may be rejected in the first 37\%, and in practice people also tend to stop earlier\cite{Bearden_early}. In this paper, we argued that in most cases, the best-only optimization does not obtain an optimal outcome, while the optimal cutoff should be $O(\sqrt{n})$. And we also showed that in some strict objective that only cares several best candidates, $\Theta(n)$ skips are still needed.