OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
We study policy experimentation in organizations with endogenous membership. An organization initiates a policy experiment and then decides when to stop it based on its results. As information arrives, agents update their beliefs, and become more pessimistic whenever they observe bad outcomes. At the same time, the organization’s membership adjusts endogenously: unsuccessful experiments drive out conservative members, leaving the organization with a radical median voter. We show that there are conditions under which the latter effect dominates. As a result, policy experiments, once begun, continue for too long. In fact, the organization may experiment forever in the face of mounting negative evidence. This result provides a rationale for obstinate behavior by organizations, and contrasts with models of collective experimentation with fixed membership, in which under-experimentation is the typical outcome. Our results extend to settings with heterogeneous payoffs and settings with heterogeneous levels of membership (e.g., shareholders of a firm).
Link to paper: scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/germang/files/experimentationpaper-1019_01.pdf
Please sign up for meetings here: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WTp83AxJaVGv6sMlwBer43q68i43dAe9BSeyb26ypa4/edit#gid=0
