The multi-shop ski rental problem

We consider the multi-shop ski rental problem. This problem generalizes the classic ski rental problem to a multi-shop setting, in which each shop has different prices for renting and purchasing a pair of skis, and a consumer has to make decisions on when and where to buy. We are interested in the optimal online (competitive-ratio minimizing) mixed strategy from the consumer's perspective. For our problem in its basic form, we obtain exciting closed-form solutions and a linear time algorithm for computing them. We further demonstrate the generality of our approach by investigating three extensions of our basic problem, namely ones that consider costs incurred by entering a shop or switching to another shop. Our solutions to these problems suggest that the consumer must assign positive probability in exactly one shop at any buying time. Our results apply to many real-world applications, ranging from cost management in IaaS cloud to scheduling in distributed computing.