Dynamic Programming in Ordered Vector Space

Abstract: Recent approaches to the theory of dynamic programming view dynamic programs as families of policy operators acting on partially ordered sets. In this paper, we extend these ideas by shifting from arbitrary partially ordered sets to ordered vector space. The advantage of working in this setting is that ordered vector spaces have well integrated algebric and order structure, which leads to sharper fixed point results. These fixed point results can then be exploited to obtain strong optimality properties. We illustrate our results through a range of applications, including new findings for several useful models.