Sequential Observation and Selection with Rank-Dependent Payoffs: An Experimental Test
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چکیده
We report the results of two experiments with different parameter sets designed to study sequential observation and selection decision problems in which payoffs increase monotonically in the quality of the selected alternative. In this class of search problems, applicants are interviewed one at a time, decision makers only learn the applicant's rank relative to the applicants that have been interviewed and rejected, the decision to stop terminates the search, and payoffs decrease in the overall (and unknown) absolute rank of the selected applicant. Compared to the optimal policy, which we computed numerically, the subjects terminated their search too early in both experiments. Results from a probability estimation task conducted in Experiment 2 show that subjects overestimate the absolute quality of applicants given their relative rank. We competitively tested three behavioral decision rules and found that a multi-threshold rule, which has the same form as the optimal policy but is parameterized differently, best accounts for the data. The alternative parameterization that results in stopping too early can be explained by the estimation results from Experiment 2.
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تاریخ انتشار 2004