Learning to hesitate

Descamps, Ambroise; Massoni, Sébastien; Page, Lionel

doi:10.1007/s10683-021-09718-7

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…The inclusion of these data or the exclusion of these subjects from analyses does not change the qualitative results. 22 The finding of oversearch in low-cost and undersearch in high-cost environments is in line with recent findings of Descamps, Massoni, and Page (2021). However, in their experiment undersearch is not due to the equilibrium being a corner solution.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 82%

Costly information acquisition in centralized matching markets

Hakimov,

Kübler,

Pan

2023

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When applying to a university, students and their parents devote considerable time acquiring information about university programs in order to form preferences. We explore ways to reduce wasteful information acquisition, that is, to help students avoid acquiring information about out‐of‐reach schools or universities, using a market design approach. Focusing on markets where students are ranked by universities based on exam scores, we find that, both theoretically and experimentally, a sequential serial dictatorship mechanism leads to higher student welfare than a direct serial dictatorship mechanism. This is because the sequential mechanism informs students about which universities are willing to admit them, thereby directing their search. Our experiments also show that the sequential mechanism has behavioral advantages because subjects deviate from the optimal search strategy less frequently than under the direct mechanism. Furthermore, providing historical cutoff scores under the direct mechanism can increase student welfare, especially when the information costs are high, although the observed effect is weaker than that of a sequential mechanism.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 82%

Costly information acquisition in centralized matching markets

Hakimov,

Kübler,

Pan

2023

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show abstract

“…Considering the vast "à la Secretary" literature, an undersearch tendency is mainly observed (Hey, 1987;Seale and Rapoport, 1997;Sonnemans, 1998;Seale and Rapoport, 2000;Bearden et al, 2006;Schunk and Winter, 2009;Oprea et al, 2009;Costa and Averbeck, 2013). Clear-cut conclusions have not been provided as (Zwick et al, 2003;Descamps et al, 2022) found both effects of under-and oversearch depending on the exploration costs. Theoretical findings of our sequential search tasks suggest the existence of an optimal stopping threshold on the quality of an explored alternative in order for such alternative to be accepted.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%