Why do these quite different best-choice problems have the same solutions?

Citation
M. Samuels, Stephen, Why do these quite different best-choice problems have the same solutions?, Advances in applied probability , 36(1), 2004, pp. 398-416
ISSN journal
00018678
Volume
36
Issue
1
Year of publication
2004
Pages
398 - 416
Database
ACNP
SICI code
Abstract
The full-information best-choice problem, as posed by Gilbert and Mosteller in 1966, asks us to find a stopping rule which maximizes the probability of selecting the largest of a sequence of n i.i.d. standard uniform random variables. Porosinski, in 1987, replaced a fixed n by a random N, uniform on (1, 2, . .., n} and independent of the observations. A partial-information problem, imbedded in a 1980 paper of Petruccelli, keeps n fixed but allows us to observe only the sequence of ranges (max - min), as well as whether or not the current observation is largest so far. Recently, Porosinski compared the solutions to his and Petruccelli's problems and found that the two problems have identical optimal rules as well as risks that are asymptotically equal. His discovery prompts the question: why? This paper gives a good explanation of the equivalence of the optimal rules. But even under the lens of a planar Poison process model, it leaves the equivalence of the asymptotic risks as somewhat of a mystery. Meanwhile, two other problems have been shown to have the same limiting risks: the full-information problem with the (suboptimal) Porosinski-Petruccelli stopping rule, and the full-information 'duration of holding the best' problem of Ferguson, Hardwick and Tamaki, which turns out to be nothing but the Porosinski problem in disguise.