Whether or not to open Pandora's box

Laura Doval

Discussion Papers from Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science

Abstract: Weitzman's [15] search model requires that, conditional on stopping, the agent only takes boxes which have already been inspected. We relax this assumption and allow the agent to take any uninspected box without inspecting its contents when stopping. Thus, each uninspected box is now a potential outside option. This introduces a new trade-off: every time the agent inspects a box, he loses the value of the option to take it without inspection. Nevertheless, we find that, under conditions common in the search and information acquisition literature, boxes are inspected following the same order as in Weitzman's rule; however, the stopping rule is different, and we characterize it. Moreover, we provide additional results that partially characterize the optimal policy when these conditions fail.

Keywords: search; information acquisition JEL Classification: D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-10-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/research/math/papers/1574.pdf main text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/research/math/papers/1574.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/research/math/papers/1574.pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Whether or not to open Pandora's box (2018)
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:nwu:cmsems:1574

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Northwestern University, Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science, Northwestern University, 580 Jacobs Center, 2001 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208-2014. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Fran Walker ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).