  Consider a decision maker who is responsible to collect observations so as to
enhance his information in a speedy manner about an underlying phenomena of
interest. The policies under which the decision maker selects sensing actions
can be categorized based on the following two factors: i) sequential vs.
non-sequential; ii) adaptive vs. non-adaptive. Non-sequential policies collect
a fixed number of observation samples and make the final decision afterwards;
while under sequential policies, the sample size is not known initially and is
determined by the observation outcomes. Under adaptive policies, the decision
maker relies on the previous collected samples to select the next sensing
action; while under non-adaptive policies, the actions are selected independent
of the past observation outcomes.
  In this paper, performance bounds are provided for the policies in each
category. Using these bounds, sequentiality gain and adaptivity gain, i.e., the
gains of sequential and adaptive selection of actions are characterized.
