A person has to find the best among N potential candidates (pick the envelope with the highest amount of money, find the best candidate for a job, the best partner to marry, etc.). The quality of individual candidates can be discovered by examining candidates one-by-one. However, a candidate, once rejected, cannot be chosen later on. The person who decides knows N, but has no idea about the properties of the actual distribution (like the range) of qualities. How many candidates should the person examine? What is the optimal rule with regard to stopping and accepting a particular candidate? ...

Sir Tim Berners Lee is worried about the spread of cult thinking over the web. When Cern, where he did his pioneering work on the web, turned on the Large Hadron Collider LHC in September 2008, fears about a black hole swallowing the Earth quickly spread over the internet. Other internet rumours hold that some harmless vaccines are dangerous to children.

Sir Tim considers the introduction of labels for trustworthiness of websites.

Information Economics treats important aspects of such labels. Chapter 6 discusses the economics of the supply of quality labels like credit ratings, Chapter 10 shows how misleading information can spread even among relatively rational individuals.

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