报告题目：Information Design of a Delegated Search
报 告 人：胡震禹
报告时间：2024年05月29日（星期三），10:00-11:30
报告地点：笃行楼712会议室
主办单位：东北财经大学现代供应链管理研究院
【报告人简介】
胡震禹，现任新加坡国立大学Department of Analytics & Operations主任讲席副教授，是《M&SOM》的副主编，MS、OR等期刊的审稿人。他于伊利诺伊大学香槟分校获得工业工程博士学位，在中山大学获得数学学士学位。他的研究重点为动态定价和收益管理、供应链管理以及机制和信息设计。他在《Management Science》、《Operations Research》、《Journal of Mathematical Economics》、《Production and Operations Management》、《Manufacturing & Service Operations Management》等期刊上发表和录用多篇论文。
【摘要】
A principal delegates a sequential search in finite horizon to an agent, who bears the search cost and controls when to terminate the search. Upon termination, the search payoff is split between the principal and agent. However, only the principal can evaluate each search outcome, whose value is thus unobservable to the agent. Leveraging this informational advantage, the principal designs an information policy to strategically provide the agent with some information about the search results over time. We obtain a complete analytical characterization of the principal’s optimal policy, which is fully prescribed by a sequence of deterministic acceptance standards, one for each period. The agent is recommended and voluntarily willing to continue the search if and only if the current termination payoff fails to meet that period’s standard. In particular, the principal gradually lowers the standard over time. When the search results are recallable, the optimal policy provides no information and the agent keeps searching up to a cutoff period, after which the acceptance standard in each subsequent period is determined independently of other periods by equating the agent’s search cost with his marginal return from an additional search in that period. When the search results are not recallable, the acceptance standards are informative and determined recursively across different periods as the optimal stopping thresholds that the principal would employ should she conduct each search by herself at a shadow cost. The shadow cost signifies how difficult it is for the principal to persuade the agent to conduct the search.
