OxTalks will soon be transitioning to Oxford Events (full details are available on the Staff Gateway). A two-week publishing freeze is expected in early Hilary to allow all events to be migrated to the new platform. During this period, you will not be able to submit or edit events on OxTalks. The exact freeze dates will be confirmed as soon as possible.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
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.
