| Article ID: | iaor20051876 |
| Country: | Netherlands |
| Volume: | 33 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| Start Page Number: | 231 |
| End Page Number: | 234 |
| Publication Date: | May 2005 |
| Journal: | Operations Research Letters |
| Authors: | Pearson David |
| Keywords: | finance & banking |
Optimally making change – representing a given value with the fewest coins from a set of denominations – is in general NP-hard. In most real money systems however, the greedy algorithm is optimal. We give a polynomial-time algorithm to determine, for a given coin system, whether the greedy algorithm is optimal.