COMPARISONS OF DEPENDENCE FOR STATIONARY MARKOV PROCESSES

Abstract

Results and conditions which quantify the decrease in dependence with lag for a stationary Markov process and enable one to compare the dependence for two stationary Markov processes are obtained. The notions of dependence used in this article are the supermodular ordering and the concordance ordering. Both discrete-time and continuous-time Markov processes are considered. Some applications of the main results are given. In queueing theory, the monotonicity results of the waiting time of the nth customer as well as the stationary waiting time in an MR/GI/1 queue and the stationary workload in a Markov-modulated queue are established, thus strengthening previous results while simplifying their derivation. This article is a continuation of those by Fang et al. [7] and Hu and Joe [10].