Also referred to as "the bachelor's problem", "the secretary problem", and "the wife selection problem", this problem was originally posed by Martin Gardner in his Mathematical Recreations column in the February 1960 issue of The Scientific American and is a well-studied optimization problem,

A sultan has granted a commoner a chance to marry one of his daughters. The commoner will be presented with the daughters one at a time and, when each daughter is presented, the commoner will be told the daughter's dowry (which is fixed in advance). Upon being presented with a daughter, the commoner must immediately decide whether to accept or reject her (he is not allowed to return to a previously rejected daughter). However, the sultan will allow the marriage to take place only if the commoner picks the daughter with the overall highest dowry. Then what is the commoner's best strategy, assuming he knows nothing about the distribution of dowries?

Analysis here.