Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 February 2007
In this article we first give a characterization of a class of probability transition matrices having closed-form solutions for transient distributions and the steady-state distribution. We propose to apply the stochastic comparison approach to construct bounding chains belonging to this class. Therefore, bounding chains can be analyzed efficiently through closed-form solutions in order to provide bounds on the distributions of the considered Markov chain. We present algorithms to construct upper-bounding matrices in the sense of the ≤st and ≤icx order.