Coping with Incomplete Information - Stochastic and Online Models

Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the help of a number of people. I wish to thank all those who have been involved directly or indirectly. In particular, I thank my advisor Rolf Möhring for his support and trust, and for letting me pursue independent research on topics that I am interested in. I benefited a lot from the opportunity to join the academic research community by visiting workshops, international conferences, and other research groups. Also I wish to thank Martin Skutella for taking the second assessment of this thesis. His enthusiasm and his stimulating ideas in any discussion are amazing and keep infecting me. Furthermore, I am greatly indebted to my collaborators on material in this thesis, I enjoyed the discussions, and definitely learned a lot from all of them. It was certainly a very fortunate circumstance to meet Tjark in the beginning of my time as a PhD student. It was a pleasure working with him on different problems, convincing each other of new ideas or doubting those of the other one, and sharing moments of cheering as well as disappointment – although, I hardly remember the latter. I thank him for being such a good research sparring partner and a great friend. I also want to thank Ekkehard for reading different parts of this thesis. Besides the people that where directly involved in preparing this thesis, several people contributed indirectly. Thanks to the members of the research groups ofscherer for pleasant joint work, fruitful discussions and motivation in various ways. I am extremely grateful to my parents and my sister for their unlimited support, their unshakeable believe in me, and for their interest in my work. Finally, I wish to thank Matthias Habenicht for his constant support and encouragement , and always patiently listening to me in moments of frustration and euphoria.