We study a sequential social learning model where agents privately acquire information by costly search. Search costs of agents are private to them, and are independently and identically distributed. We show that asymptotic learning occurs if and only if search costs are not bounded away from...

This paper analyses the role of information in the search process. Ibuild a simple model of a good with two random attributes with somejoint probability distribution. I consider seemingly unimportant changesin this distribution, i.e. changes which neither affect expected utility norits variance....

We formulate and solve a costly multi-unit search problem for the optimal selling of a stock of goods. Our showcase application is an inventory liquidation problem with fixed holding costs, such as warehousing, salaries or floor planning. A seller faces a stream of buyers periodically arriving...

This paper studies how dynamic changes in the search environment affect consumer search and purchase behavior. We develop a dynamic model that incorporates a non-stationary search environment and propose a feasible estimation procedure to estimate its parameters. We apply our model and...

When making a decision, humans consider two types of information: information they have acquired through their prior experience of the world, and further information they gather to support the decision in question. Here, we present evidence that data from search engines such as Google can help...

We study many-to-one matching markets in a dynamic framework with the following features: Matching is irreversible, participants exogenously join the market over time, each agent is restricted by a quota, and agents are perfectly patient. A form of strategic behavior in such markets emerges: The...

This paper studies the impact of Knightian uncertainty on the disposition of individuals in the lab to seize an irreversible investment. Subjects had the option to trade a safe endowment for a claim on the sum of future realizations from a geometric random walk. The drift of this profit process...

Recent research has shown that the standard labor matching model has difficulties in reproducing the co-movement patterns observed in US data. This is due to the fact that the standard model lacks sufficient propagation of shocks. This paper shows that refining the informational structure of the...

We develop and estimate a model of consumer search with spatial learning. Consumers make inferences from previously searched objects to unsearched objects that are nearby in attribute space, generating path dependence in search sequences. The estimated model rationalizes patterns in data on...

Many decision problems in various fields of application can be characterized as diagnostic problems trying to assess the true state (of the world) of given cases. The investigation of assessment criteria improves the initial information according to observed signal outcomes, which are related to...