Renewal approximation for the absorption time of a decreasing Markov chain

Abstract

We consider a Markov chain $(M_{n})_{n\ge 0}$ on the set $\mathbb{N}_{0}$ of nonnegative integers which is eventually decreasing, i.e. $\mathbb{P}\{M_{n+1}<M_{n}|M_{n}\ge a\}=1$ for some $a\in\mathbb{N}$ and all $n\ge 0$. We are interested in the asymptotic behaviour of the law of the stopping time $T=T(a):=\inf\{k\in\mathbb{N}_{0}: M_{k}<a\}$ under $\mathbb{P}_{n}:=\mathbb{P}(\cdot|M_{0}=n)$ as $n\to\infty$. Assuming that the decrements of $(M_{n})_{n\ge 0}$ given $M_{0}=n$ possess a kind of stationarity for large $n$, we derive sufficient conditions for the convergence in minimal $L^{p}$-distance of $\mathbb{P}_{n}((T-a_{n})/b_{n}\in\cdot)$ to some non-degenerate, proper law and give an explicit form of the constants $a_{n}$ and $b_{n}$.