On Linear Threshold Policies for Continuous-Time Dynamic Yield Management

Abstract: We study the finite-horizon continuous-time dynamic yield management problem with stationary arrival rates and two customer types. We consider a class of linear threshold policies proposed by Hodge (2008), in which each less-profitable customer is accepted if and only if the remaining inventory exceeds a threshold that linearly decreases over the horizon. We use a Markov chain representation to show that such policies achieve uniformly bounded regret. We then generalize this result to analogous policies for arbitrarily many customer types.