Search Under Accumulated Pressure
Saed Alizamir, Francis de Véricourt, Peng Sun · Operations Research · 2019
The paper “Search Under Accumulated Pressure” explores how time pressure in the form of task accumulation might affect the information-gathering process of a decision maker. Decision makers often need to balance the benefit of improving their belief about the best choice against the cost of acquiring more information. In many instances, the cost to acquire additional information depends on the size of the accumulated workload. The paper formulates this problem as a partially observable Markov decision process and characterizes the optimal control policy. The analysis reveals that the highest workload that the decision maker is willing to sustain may increase in the middle of the information search. This runs counter to the more intuitive argument that, as the search for information on a task progresses, the decision maker becomes less willing to sustain a high level of workload.