competitive analysis for online leasing problem with compound interest rate竞争分析复合利率在线租赁问题.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Abstract and Applied Analysis Volume 2011, Article ID 156254, 12 pages doi:10.1155/2011/156254 Research Article Competitive Analysis for Online Leasing Problem with Compound Interest Rate Xingyu Yang, Weiguo Zhang, Weijun Xu, and Yong Zhang School of Business Administration, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510640, China Correspondence should be addressed to Xingyu Yang, bmxyuyang@ Received 23 May 2011; Accepted 18 June 2011 Academic Editor: Allan C Peterson Copyright q 2011 Xingyu Yang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We introduce the compound interest rate into the continuous version of the online leasing problem and discuss the generalized model by competitive analysis. On the one hand, the optimal deterministic strategy and its competitive ratio are obtained; on the other hand, a nearly optimal randomized strategy is constructed and a lower bound for the randomized competitive ratios is proved by Yao’s principle. With the help of numerical examples, the theoretical results show that the interest rate puts off the purchase date and diminishes the uncertainty involved in the decision making. 1. Introduction In this paper, we consider the continuous version of the online leasing problem in a market with compound interest rate. In this problem, an online player needs some equipment e.g., a computer, a car for an initially unknown amount of time. To use the equipment, he may choose from the following two options: to lease it for a leasing fee a per unit of time the leasing option or to buy it for a larger amount P the buying option. Once the player has bou