Two-Armed Restless Bandits with Imperfect Information: Stochastic Control and Indexability / Roland G. Fryer, Jr., Philipp Harms.

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Fryer, Roland G, Jr

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Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w19043.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2013.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

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Abstract: We present a two-armed bandit model of decision making under uncertainty where the expected return to investing in the "risky arm'' increases when choosing that arm and decreases when choosing the "safe'' arm. These dynamics are natural in applications such as human capital development, job search, and occupational choice. Using new insights from stochastic control, along with a monotonicity condition on the payoff dynamics, we show that optimal strategies in our model are stopping rules that can be characterized by an index which formally coincides with Gittins' index. Our result implies the indexability of a new class of "restless'' bandit models.

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May 2013.

We present a two-armed bandit model of decision making under uncertainty where the expected return to investing in the "risky arm'' increases when choosing that arm and decreases when choosing the "safe'' arm. These dynamics are natural in applications such as human capital development, job search, and occupational choice. Using new insights from stochastic control, along with a monotonicity condition on the payoff dynamics, we show that optimal strategies in our model are stopping rules that can be characterized by an index which formally coincides with Gittins' index. Our result implies the indexability of a new class of "restless'' bandit models.