Consider a good (such as a hotel room) which, if not sold on time, is worth nothing to the seller. For a customer who is considering a choice of such goods, their prices may change dramatically by the time the customer needs to use the good; thus a customer who is aware of this fact might choose to gamble, delaying buying until the last moment in the hopes of better prices. While this gamble ca...

Although some sellers have practiced advanced selling, the generality of its profit advantage is just now being realized. Further, recent development in technologies such as electronic tickets, smart cards, biometrics, and online prepayments now make it appropriate for nearly all services. Advance selling can improve profits for reasons very different from the traditional price discrimination e...

The need for transplant organs has far outstripped the supply of available cadaveric organs. Hundreds of people on waiting lists, who could be saved by transplantation, die each year. This severe shortage has justified the extension of transplantation to the use of living donors, but there are still not enough organs to meet the need. This paper discusses the justification for changing policies...

A seller has an object for sale and can reach buyers only through intermediaries, who also have privileged information about buyers’ valuations. Intermediaries can either mediate the transaction by buying the object and reselling it–the merchant model– or refer buyers to the seller and release information for a fee–the agency model. The merchant model suffers from double marginalization and the...

The proliferation of both online and bricks and mortar outlet stores underscores the observation that secondary markets are readily accessible to retailers of short-life-cycle products. These secondary markets provide recourse channels for retailers to sell excess inventory of outof-favor items at reduced prices when overstocking occurs in a primary market. We study the problem of determining w...

We are concerned with the optimal decision to sell or buy a stock in a given period with reference to the ultimate average of the stock price. More precisely, we aim to determine an optimal selling (buying) time to maximize (minimize) the expectation of the ratio of the selling (buying) price to the ultimate average price over the period. This is an optimal stopping time problem which can be fo...

In this paper, reinforcement learning is used in order to model the reputation of buying and selling agents. Two important factors, quality and price, are considered in the proposed model. Each selling agent learns to evaluate the reputation of buying agents, based on their pro ts for that seller and uses this reputation to dedicate a discount for reputable buying agents. Also, selling agents l...

This work is concerned with an optimal selling rule for a large position of stock in a market. Selling a large block of stock in a short period typically depresses the market, which would result in a poor filling price. In addition, the large selling intensity makes the regime more likely to be poor state in the market. In this paper, regime switching and depressing terms associated with sellin...