Pandora's Box Reopened: Robust Search and Choice Overload

Sarah Auster and Yeon-Koo Che

No 20984, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: This paper revisits the classic Pandora's box problem, studying a decision-maker (DM) who seeks to minimize her maximal ex-post regret. The DM decides how many options to explore and in what order, before choosing one or taking an outside option. We characterize the regret-minimizing search rule and show that the likelihood of opting out often increases as more options become available for exploration. We show that this "choice overload" is driven by the DM's fear of "selection error" – the regret from searching the wrong options – suggesting that steering choice via recommendations or cost heterogeneity can mitigate regret and encourage search.

JEL-codes: D81 D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-12
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP20984 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:20984

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP20984

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().