Whether or not to open Pandora’s box

Weitzman’s [13] search model requires that, conditional on stopping, theagent only takes boxes which have already been inspected. We relax thisassumption and allow the agent to take any uninspected box without in-specting its contents when stopping. Thus, each uninspected box is nowa potential outside option. This introduces a new trade-off: every timethe agent inspects a box, he loses the value of the option to take it with-out inspection. Nevertheless, we identify conditions under which boxes areinspected following the same order as in Weitzman’s rule; however, the stop-ping rule is different, and we characterize it. Moreover, we provide additionalresults that partially characterize the optimal policy when these conditionsfail.