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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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In their study examining the tradeoffs between parallel and sequential testing, Loch et al (2001) highlight a rather curious conclusion: sequential testing, because of its ability learn from one to next, will result in fewer tests. Indeed, the ability to learn from one to next can enable faster stopping (and …

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