Online Allocation with Risk Information

摘要

We consider the problem of dynamically apportioning resources among a set of options in a worst-case online framework. The model we investigate is a generalization of the well studied online learning model. In particular, we allow the learner to see as additional information how high the risk of each option is. This assumption is natural in many applications like horse-race betting, where gamblers know odds for all options before placing bets. We apply the Aggregating Algorithm to this problem and give a tight performance bound. The bound we give intuitively implies that the algorithm performs better when faced with options of various risks than when faced with options of the same risk.