Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/336605 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Series/Report no.: 
Discussion Paper No. 555
Publisher: 
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München und Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Collaborative Research Center Transregio 190 - Rationality and Competition, München und Berlin
Abstract: 
We study sampling from a finite population without replacement when seeking an extreme (lowest or highest) value. An example is a buyer searching for the lowest price. It is well known that there are decreasing returns to sampling from continuous populations: the expected minimum is a decreasing and discretely convex function of the sample size. We show that is true for sampling without replacement from a finite population. We also give a simple sufficient condition on population values for the properties to hold for other order statistics.
Subjects: 
order statistics
sampling without replacement
decreasing returns
consumer search
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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