Over the past two decades, endowments have become an increasingly important component of the typical university’s resource base. We examine how U.S. doctoral institutions’ endowment payout policies and spending decisions are affected by financial market shocks to endowments. While most endowments have formal payout policies intended to smooth payouts over time, we find that universities are mor...

The classical secretary problem studies the problem of selecting online an element (a “secretary”) with maximum value in a randomly ordered sequence. The difficulty lies in the fact that an element must be either selected or discarded upon its arrival, and this decision is irrevocable. Constant-competitive algorithms are known for the classical secretary problems (see, e.g., the survey of Freem...

In the classical secretary problem an employer would like to choose the best candidate among n competing candidates that arrive in a random order. This basic concept of n elements arriving in a random order and irrevocable decisions made by an algorithm have been explored extensively over the years, and used for modeling the behavior of many processes. Our main contribution is a new linear prog...

The full-information secretary problem in which the objective is to minimize the expected rank is seen to have a value smaller than 7/3 for all n (the number of options). This can be achieved by a simple memoryless threshold rule. The asymptotically optimal value for the class of such rules is about 2.3266. For a large finite number of options, the optimal stopping rule depends on the whole seq...

We consider the following secretary problem: items ranked from 1 to n are randomly selected without replacement, one at a time, and tòwin' is to stop at an item whose overall rank is less than or equal to s, given only the relative ranks of the items drawn so far. Our method of analysis is based on the existence of an imbedded Markov chain and uses the technique of backwards induction. In princ...

The secretary problem for selecting one item so as to minimize its expected rank, based on observing the relative ranks only, is revisited. A simple suboptimal rule, which performs almost as well as the optimal rule, is given. The rule stops with the smallest i such that Ri ≤ ic/(n + 1 − i) for a given constant c, where Ri is the relative rank of the i observation, and n is the total number of ...

The most important open conjecture in the context of the matroid secretary problem claims the existence of an O(1)-competitive algorithm applicable to any matroid. Whereas this conjecture remains open, modified forms of it have been shown to be true, when assuming that the assignment of weights to the secretaries is not adversarial but uniformly at random [23, 20]. However, so far, no variant o...

The VA Secretary occupies probably the most thankless job in Washington. On the one hand the Secretary is expected to seamlessly provide the plethora of benefits and services a grateful nation offers veterans who have sacrificed body and mind in military service, and to those who need transition services. On the other, the Secretary must strictly obey all laws and follow all Administration poli...

, 2 HOBBY LOBBY STORES, INC.; Mardel, Inc.; David Green; Barbara Green; Mart Green; Steve Green; Darsee Lett, Plaintiffs–Appellants, v. Kathleen SEBELIUS, in her official capacity as Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services; United States Department of Health and Human Services; Hilda Solis, Secretary of the United States Department of Labor; United States Departme...