The optimal stopping point
Suppose you want to hire an assistant to alleviate the mundane tasks of your job. Every day that you have the job search open, an assistant comes for an interview. Immediately after the interview you have to choose whether to hire or not hire the interviewee. The hire/no hire decision is irreversible — i.e. if you reject someone, you can’t later decide to hire them. Under these conditions, how do you determine which candidate to hire? The trade-offs are intuitive: if you don’t hire, you incur the overhead of interviewing and don’t reap the benefits of having an assistant; if you hire too early, you may be missing out on a better assistant that’s potentially coming up as a candidate. ...