Abstract
This doctoral thesis consists of three self-contained chapters.
Chapter 1 investigates the problem of a principal who wishes to procure information through an expert. To obtain information, the expert performs a cognitively expensive task and reports its outcome to the principal. Both these aspects are unobservable to the principal. We assume that the principal offers a set of payment schemes to the expert that is dependent on what the expert reports to the principal and the true state of the world. We characterize payment schemes that incentivize the expert to acquire the desired information of the principal and describe the properties of the minimal payment scheme.
Chapter 2 considers the problem of a manager who wishes to interview candidates before hiring. The manager interviews candidates sequentially and can decide the amount of information she wishes to acquire about each candidate with more information leading to larger costs. We find that it earlier candidates are less unlikely to pass the interview than later ones. We then discuss the implications of this property in the context of discrimination in job hirings.
Chapter 3 considers a policy maker who decides whether she should implement a policy that worked well in another environment. The policy is assumed to have two dimensions, where the first is the preconditions for it to have worked well in the original environment while the second is related to the idiosyncrasies of the environment at hand. We investigate how uncertainty in the first dimension affects information acquisition in the second environment and find conditions under which the policy maker investigates only the first dimension.