A weakest link marked stopping problem

Stevena Lippman, Sheldon M. Ross, Sridhar Seshadri

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

We consider a model in which we have k items to be sold. Potential buyers make offers in a sequential fashion. Once made, the offer is either rejected or marked for acceptance. Once k items have been marked, the items are then sold to the buyers whose offers were marked, but at a price equal to the minimum of the k marked offers. Assuming that the successive offers are independent and identically distributed according to a specified distribution and that there is a fixed cost incurred whenever an offer is rejected, we determine structural results about the optimal policy, present computational approaches for finding the optimal policy, and give some heuristic policies.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)843-851
Number of pages9
JournalJournal of Applied Probability
Volume44
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2007
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Marked stopping problem
  • Online heuristic
  • Structure of optimal policy
  • Weakest link

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Statistics and Probability
  • General Mathematics
  • Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty

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