TY - JOUR
T1 - Dynamic delegation of experimentation
AU - Guo, Yingni
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 American Economic Association. All rights reserved.
Copyright:
Copyright 2016 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2016/8
Y1 - 2016/8
N2 - I study a dynamic relationship where a principal delegates experimentation to an agent. Experimentation is modeled as a one-armed bandit that yields successes following a Poisson process. Its unknown intensity is high or low. The agent has private information, his type being his prior belief that the intensity is high. The agent values successes more than the principal does, so prefers more experimentation. The optimal mechanism is a cutoff rule in the belief space: the cutoff gives pessimistic types total freedom but curtails optimistic types' behavior. Pessimistic types overexperiment while the most optimistic ones underexperiment. This delegation rule is time consistent.
AB - I study a dynamic relationship where a principal delegates experimentation to an agent. Experimentation is modeled as a one-armed bandit that yields successes following a Poisson process. Its unknown intensity is high or low. The agent has private information, his type being his prior belief that the intensity is high. The agent values successes more than the principal does, so prefers more experimentation. The optimal mechanism is a cutoff rule in the belief space: the cutoff gives pessimistic types total freedom but curtails optimistic types' behavior. Pessimistic types overexperiment while the most optimistic ones underexperiment. This delegation rule is time consistent.
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U2 - 10.1257/aer.20141215
DO - 10.1257/aer.20141215
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84982950739
VL - 106
SP - 1969
EP - 2008
JO - American Economic Review
JF - American Economic Review
SN - 0002-8282
IS - 8
ER -