Optimal Strategies for Selling an Asset

This paper considers the problem of selling an asset on the open market. The seller receives a random sequence of price offers, which may arrive either periodically or randomly over time. After each offer is received, the seller must decide whether or not to sell, weighing the possibility of obtaining a better offer against the cost of waiting. A number of authors have established the properties of optimal selling policies when the distribution of offers is known and offers are received periodically. This paper investigates the conditions under which these same properties hold for an unknown offer distribution which is updated as successive offers are received.