Essays on reputation, optimal experimentation and regret

This thesis addresses highly relevant concerns, which arise from decision making under uncertainty. It contributes to the economic theory literature on reputation, experimentation and regret. The first problem I study is on reputation building. The quest for having a good reputation rarely happens in isolation but in markets or other social contexts. It is therefore important to understand how reputational concerns interplay with competition and which consequences this has for product quality. This question is studied in the first paper of the thesis. The second paper considers the amount of optimal experimentation of an agent, who faces a large number of correlated options with unknown quality. How long should the agent search, before she settles down with the best option discovered so far? Situations like these are of great importance in research and product innovation. Finally, the last paper addresses a problem of optimal decision making when the agent anticipates that she is subject to regret considerations. Regret is a potent force in shaping and impacting our decisions as evidenced by a large body of psychological and economic literature