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
Sequential search is ubiquitous in empirical and theoretical economics. A worker is presented with a set of job offers that he explores sequentially until he finally accepts one or quits the labor force, a consumer is presented with a set of products that he queries until he buys one or exits the market, etc. To identify the welfare-maximizing sequence is a complicated task whenever there is uncertainty on the quality of the elements in the order. I characterize the ordering and information provision problem as a Principal-Agent model in a repeated game setting. While agents are strict posterior maximizers, the Principal is long-lived, and, consequently, is willing to explore the ordering space to make better recommendations down the road.
I leverage Bandit and Learning Theory to derive near optimal sequencing strategies in the presence of incomplete information. When the outcome of the game is available to the principal at the end of the period, I identify a near-optimal algorithm in a non-parametric setting. I then show that, under some parametric assumptions, there is no loss in restricting the feedback space to the actions of the agents, without observing the outcome of the game. I discuss the applications of these results to labor markets, experimental design, platform design, finance, and more.