Prophet Inequalities for a New Class of Overbooking Problems in Container Shipping

A New Class of Overbooking Problems in Container Shipping Industry Container carriers lose billions of dollars each year when shippers reserve slots but fail to show up with the corresponding cargo. This paper studies an online booking problem under a deposit-based mechanism designed to better align incentives and mitigate the costs of overbooking. The authors derive near-optimal online policies for two demand settings: one in which shippers’ no-show behavior is coupled through a spot market, and another in which no-shows are independent. In the coupled setting, a randomized threshold policy guarantees at least 81.9% of clairvoyant profit. In the independent setting, a simple greedy policy is shown to be asymptotically 0.5-optimal as the number of slots tends to infinity. Extensive simulations further demonstrate strong and robust practical performance.