Analysis of heuristic solutions to the best choice problem

In the sequential decision making task known as the best choice problem, n items are presented in a random order one at a time. After each item, the decision maker (DM) can determine only their relative ranks. The DM's goal is to select the best of all n items without the possibility of recalling previously observed items. The purpose of this paper is to compare the optimal policy to three classes of heuristic decision rules that were identified and studied in previous research. We also investigate the limiting case as n→∞.