Asset-selling problems with holding costs

Sequential stochastic assignment problems now comprise a significant litera ture that includes such important economical applications as the classical asset-selling problem and labor-market analysis (job search). In this type of problems there is a stream of bidders to whom several identical units at the disposal of the decision maker have to be sold. In this paper we incor porate holding costs to be incurred on the units (say assets) at hand into the classical model. Optimal strategies are defined as selling decision-rul es which maximize the total expected net reward from the units. We take advantage of the specific structure offered by the framework of seq uential stochastic assignment to get explicit results for the optimal strat egies. It is further shown how to implement these results for important spe cific bid distributions. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved .