A Note on the Competitive Optimality of Source Code
H. Yamamoto, Tadaai Itoh · International Symposium on Information Theory and its Applications · 1994
The competitively optimal coding is considered and it is shown that 1) if the competitively optimal code exists for a given source probability p(z), then it also minimizes the expected codeword length, and 2) if the Huffman code tree for p(z) is unbalanced in probability weight, then the competitively optimal code does not exist.