Posting Prices for a Perishable Item

In this paper, we study the problem of posting take-it-or-leave-it prices for a perishable item to maximize the seller's expected revenue. Agents arrive independently over time, and each of them makes a purchase decision according to the price. We study the case that the seller has no prior information about agents' valuations, whereas the benchmark in the competitive analysis is an optimal mechanism that knows the value distribution. We propose a mechanism Gamma(1) which obtains constant competitive ratios under various valuation models. We also conduct numerical simulations and validate the empirical performance of Gamma(1).