EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Letter to the Editor—A Test for Suboptimal Actions in Markovian Decision Problems

J. MacQueen
Additional contact information
J. MacQueen: Stanford University, Stanford, California

Operations Research, 1967, vol. 15, issue 3, 559-561

Abstract: In a Markovian decision problem, choice of an action determines an immediate return and the probability of moving to the next state. It is desired to maximize the expected total of discounted future returns. If upper and lower bounds on the optimal expected return are available, a simple test is described that may show that certain actions are suboptimal, permanently eliminating them from further consideration. This test may be incorporated into the dynamic programming routine for solving the decision problem. This was tried on Howard's automobile replacement problem, using the upper and lower bounds described in “A Modified Dynamic Programming Method” ( J. Math. Anal. and Appl. 14, April, 1966). The amount of computation required by the dynamic programming routine was reduced, conservatively, by 75 per cent.

Date: 1967
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.15.3.559 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:oropre:v:15:y:1967:i:3:p:559-561

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Operations Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:inm:oropre:v:15:y:1967:i:3:p:559-561