Beyond Competitive Analysis
Elias Koutsoupias, Christos H. Papadimitriou · SIAM Journal on Computing · 2000
The competitive analysis of online algorithms has been criticized as being too crude and unrealistic. We propose refinements of competitive analysis in two directions: The first restricts the power of the adversary by allowing only certain input distributions, while the other allows for comparisons between information regimes for online decision-making. We illustrate the first with an application to the paging problem; as a byproduct we characterize completely the work functions of this important special case of the k-server problem. We use the second refinement to explore the power of lookahead in server and task systems.