English

When to sell an indivisible object: Optimal timing with Markovian buyers

Theoretical Economics 2024-08-05 v5

Abstract

We study the problem of when to sell an indivisible object. There is a monopolistic seller who owns an indivisible object and plans to sell it over a given span of time to the set of potential buyers whose valuations for the object evolve over time. We formulate the seller's problem as a dynamic mechanism design problem. We provide a procedure for finding the optimal solution and show how to check incentive compatibility. We also discuss the threshold rule from the perspective of optimal stopping.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2105.07649,
  title  = {When to sell an indivisible object: Optimal timing with Markovian buyers},
  author = {Kiho Yoon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.07649},
  year   = {2024}
}