Overbooking with bounded loss
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 customers requesting a service. Each arrival is drawn independently from a known distribution of 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 , 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 , 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 . This improves upon prior works achieving guarantees.
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}
}