IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems
Online ISSN : 1745-1361
Print ISSN : 0916-8532
Special Section on Foundations of Computer Science- Frontiers of Theory of Computation and Algorithm -
Bounds for the Multislope Ski-Rental Problem
Hiroshi FUJIWARAKei SHIBUSAWAKouki YAMAMOTOHiroaki YAMAMOTO
Author information
JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

2020 Volume E103.D Issue 3 Pages 481-488

Details
Abstract

The multislope ski-rental problem is an online optimization problem that generalizes the classical ski-rental problem. The player is offered not only a buy and a rent options but also other options that charge both initial and per-time fees. The competitive ratio of the classical ski-rental problem is known to be 2. In contrast, the best known so far on the competitive ratio of the multislope ski-rental problem is an upper bound of 4 and a lower bound of 3.62. In this paper we consider a parametric version of the multislope ski-rental problem, regarding the number of options as a parameter. We prove an upper bound for the parametric problem which is strictly less than 4. Moreover, we give a simple recurrence relation that yields an equation having a lower bound value as its root.

Content from these authors
© 2020 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
Previous article Next article
feedback
Top