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 a seller’s choice between offering a finished or unfinished product. Finishing the product is costly and fully reveals its value to prospective buyers, while selling it unfinished introduces uncertainty about the product’s value and requires buyers to complete development themselves. Under symmetric information—i.e., when the seller also observes the value of a finished product—it is optimal to offer a finished product whenever development costs are low. Under asymmetric information, however, finishing the product introduces informational frictions. We characterize the conditions under which the product is offered finished despite these frictions, in order to discourage consumer search.