Markov Decision Processes: The Noncompetitive Case

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to the presentation of the basic theory of finite state/finite action Markov decision processes. Of course, in the context of this book, the entire subject of Markov decision processes forms only a special case of the competitive Markov decision processes, that is, Stochastic Games. Namely, this is the case where there is only one controller, and hence the underlying mathematical problem is “merely” an optimization problem.