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.
A decision maker acquires and processes information about an uncertain state of nature by an inquiry: a contingent sequence of questions to be asked before a decision is reached. Inquiry is a costly activity, with the cost proportional to its length. We characterize optimal inquiries and uncover two behavioural implications associated with costly inquiry: attention span reduction (i.e., favouring shorter inquiries by focusing on a subset of decisions and assigning them different priorities) and confirmation bias (i.e., seeking evidence through inquiry to confirm a prior guess of which decisions are optimal). This framework can be used to understand prominent cognitive biases, such as framing and search satisficing in healthcare and tunnel vision in criminal investigation.
