Letter to the Editor—A Critique of the Norman-White Dynamic Programming Approximation

Thomas E. Morton
Additional contact information
Thomas E. Morton: University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

Operations Research, 1969, vol. 17, issue 4, 751-753

Abstract: This note points out that the Norman-White procedure utilizes the full apparatus of Bellman's value iteration, but stops after one iteration. This would seem wasteful unless either one iteration could be shown to give uniformly good results, or better stopping rules could not be found. A simple counterexample shows that the possible percentage cost error of the Norman-White procedure is unbounded. The note then discusses the excellent results of the approximation for their two examples, and mentions a stopping criterion for nondiscounted value iteration that is due to D. J. White himself.

Date: 1969
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.17.4.751 (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:17:y:1969:i:4:p:751-753

Access Statistics for this article

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