Posted on Wed 29 April 2026 in Research • Tagged with search, complexity
Consider an agent engaged in local search and learning over a complex landscape. The search process occurs sequentially over discrete periods. In each period \(i\in\{1,2,\dots,n\}\), the agent pays a marginal cost \(c>0\) to learn about their local environment and draws a value \(X_{i …
Posted on Tue 16 July 2024 in Research • Tagged with dynamic programming, noisy evaluation, testing mode
Testing many alternatives, with the goal of identifying a single best alternative, can proceed in one of two ways: (i) parallel - where the agent decides on the number of alternatives to examine, and after examining them selects the one that yielded the highest value, or (ii) sequential - where the agent …
Posted on Tue 28 May 2024 in Research • Tagged with spillovers, estimation
One my coauthors, Xiaofeng Liu, and I were interested in understanding spillovers on contest platforms. While a theoretical model helped us ground the predictions, the actual empirical test turned out to be tricky to reason about (at least for me). Specifically, it turns out that the model predicts that the …
Posted on Mon 18 March 2024 in Research • Tagged with quantal choice, commitment, flexibility, noisy decisions
Firms employ stage-gates where information is evaluated before deciding to continue resource commitment toward a project. This approach, wherein investments are not fully ex-ante allocated, has the benefit of being more flexible and deferring resource commitments till better information is available. Still, does such flexibility come at a cost? One …