English

Overbooking with bounded loss

Optimization and Control 2022-04-27 v2

Abstract

We study a classical problem in revenue management: quantity-based single-resource revenue management with no-shows. In this problem, a firm observes a sequence of TT customers requesting a service. Each arrival is drawn independently from a known distribution of kk different types, and the firm needs to decide irrevocably whether to accept or reject requests in an online fashion. The firm has a capacity of resources BB, and wants to maximize its profit. Each accepted service request yields a type-dependent revenue and has a type-dependent probability of requiring a resource once all arrivals have occurred (or, be a no-show). If the number of accepted arrivals that require a resource at the end of the horizon is greater than BB, the firm needs to pay a fixed compensation for each service request that it cannot fulfill. With a clairvoyant, that knows all arrivals ahead of time, as a benchmark, we provide an algorithm with a uniform additive loss bound, i.e., its expected loss is independent of TT. This improves upon prior works achieving Ω(T)\Omega(\sqrt{T}) guarantees.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.11148,
  title  = {Overbooking with bounded loss},
  author = {Daniel Freund and Jiayu Kamessi Zhao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.11148},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:56:48.729Z