Copyright © 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.

Abstract

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.