Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. The two-week OxTalks freeze period starts on Monday 2nd March. During this time, there will be no facility to publish or edit events. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period. Once Oxford Events launches, you will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
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.
