Brown Bag seminar | Costly Sequential Screening with Salil Sharma
The seminar speaker is Salil Sharma, SSE, who will present "Costly Sequential Screening".
Abstract
Screening is a key feature in many economic environments. In many instances, screening is (i) flexible but costly and (ii) sequential. Examples include interviews by firms or job search by candidates themselves, formation of consideration sets by consumers and decisions regarding adoption of technologies.
We analyze a stylized model of screening with the above features for an agent with uniformly posterior separable costs. We show that in a setup with two alternatives each of which has two possible types, the optimal information acquisition strategy admits a simple representation. Each alternative, if screened, is assigned a binary signal which leads to an immediate action. Moreover, if the first alternative's signal is positive, it is chosen while the second alternative is not screened. We describe the set of screening strategies analytically and graphically. Finally, initial analysis on the optimal order is presented.
Salil Sharma is a PhD candidate at SSE.
This seminar takes place online via Zoom.
Please contact kristen.pendleton@hhs.se if you would like the link or have other questions.