Interactive Process Quality Improvement
研究生产过程中出现缺陷时，决策者如何通过投资学习来改进过程，直到缺陷概率足够小，并探讨了最优策略的经济含义及质量成本的传统观点与零缺陷观点之争。
An ongoing production process produces defective parts at random intervals. Each defective part provides a learning opportunity which the decision maker may use to improve the process by investing resources to identify and remove the causes of the defective. For various cost criteria, it is optimal to invest in learning until the probability of producing a defective becomes sufficiently small. This policy has economic interpretations in terms of marginal benefits. In addition, the optimal policy for expected discounted present cost has an interpretation in terms of tradeoffs between “cost of failure” and “cost of prevention”. The shape of the tradeoff curve gives insight into the controversy between the traditional and zero defects views towards cost of quality.