Recent Developments in Pandora's Box Problem: Variants and Applications

TL;DR

This survey reviews recent advances in Pandora's box problem, highlighting new variants and applications across economics, decision theory, and machine learning, reflecting growing interdisciplinary interest.

Contribution

It compiles and synthesizes recent research developments, extensions, and practical applications of Pandora's box problem in various fields.

Findings

Recent variants expand the problem's scope

Applications in market design and machine learning have increased

New theoretical insights improve decision-making strategies

Abstract

In 1979, Weitzman introduced Pandora's box problem as a framework for sequential search with costly inspections. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in Pandora's box problem, particularly among researchers working at the intersection of economics and computation. This survey provides an overview of the recent literature on Pandora's box problem, including its latest extensions and applications in areas such as market design, decision theory, and machine learning.