Optimal Search, Learning, and Implementation

Abstract:     
We derive conditions on the learning environment - which encompasses both Bayesian and non-Bayesian processes - ensuring that an efficient allocation of resources is achievable in a dynamic allocation environment where impatient, privately informed agents arrive over time, and where the designer gradually learns about the distribution of agents' values. There are two main kind of conditions: 1) Higher observations should lead to more optimistic beliefs about the distribution of future values; 2) The allowed optimism associated with higher observations needs to be carefully bounded. Our analysis reveals and exploits close, formal relations between the problem of ensuring monotone - and hence implementable - allocation rules in our dynamic allocation problems with incomplete information and learning, and between the classical problem of finding optimal stopping policies for search that are characterized by a reservation price property.

Keywords: Sequential Assignment, Learning, Dynamic Mechanism Design

JEL Classifications: C7, D7, D8

Working Paper Series