Censored lifetime learning: Optimal Bayesian age-replacement policies

We consider a sequence of age-replacement problems with a general lifetime distribution parametrized by an a-priori unknown parameter. There is a trade-off: Preventive replacements are censored but cheap, whereas corrective replacements are uncensored but costly observations of the lifetime distribution. We first analyze the optimal policy for a finite sequence and establish some properties. We then propose a myopic Bayesian policy that almost surely learns the unknown parameter and converges to the optimal policy with full knowledge of the parameter.