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
Economic agents often seek to acquire information before taking an important action, but in many domains, gathering this information requires approval from a regulator. This paper develops a model in which an agent designs an experiment to inform his decision, but can only implement it if a regulator authorizes it ex ante. We characterize the agent’s optimal experiment under this approval constraint and show that, whenever the regulator rejects full revelation, the agent strategically reduces informativeness in the states where their disagreement is strongest. We then extend the model to settings with multiple regulators, comparing sequential and collective approval mechanisms. The analysis yields predictions for how institutional structure shapes access to information, with applications to clinical trials, data privacy, and ethics boards.
