On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
We consider optimal mechanisms for inducing agents to acquire costly evidence in a setting where a principal has a good to allocate that all agents want. We show that optimal mechanisms are necessarily sequential in nature and have a threshold structure. Agents with higher costs of obtaining evidence and/or worse distributions of value for the principal are asked for evidence later, if at all. We derive these results using a static optimization problem to characterize the optimal allocation of the good and the probability each agent is asked for evidence, followed by constructing a dynamic mechanism that achieves this outcome.
