Decreasing Returns to Sampling Without Replacement

David Ronayne and David P. Myatt
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David P. Myatt: London Business School

No 555, Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series from CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition

Abstract: We study sampling from a finite population without replacement when seeking an extreme (lowest or highest) value. An example is a buyer searching for the lowest price. It is well known that there are decreasing returns to sampling from continuous populations: the expected minimum is a decreasing and discretely convex function of the sample size. We show that is true for sampling without replacement from a finite population. We also give a simple sufficient condition on population values for the properties to hold for other order statistics.

Keywords: order statistics; sampling without replacement; decreasing returns; consumer search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-11-27
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