Asset-selling problems with holding costs

Sequential stochastic assignment problems now comprise a signi"cant literature 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 decisionmaker have to be sold. In this paper we incorporate holding costs to be incurred on the units (say assets) at hand into the classical model. Optimal strategies are de"ned as selling decision-rules which maximize the total expected net reward from the units. We take advantage of the speci"c structure o!ered by the framework of sequential stochastic assignment to get explicit results for the optimal strategies. It is further shown how to implement these results for important speci"c bid distributions. 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.