| Abstract: | Kwan and Yuan 13] considered the sequential selection problem in which an employer should arrange the sequence of interviews with job applicants to fill a position. In this note, it is shown that their selection problem would be alternately interpreted as an optimal search problem or, more specifically, a discrete search problem with a stationary target. A more generalized version of the ordering problem is proposed which explicitly considers the time value of money. Also, the optimality of the ordering strategy in the generalized problem is proven by the pair-wise exchange method, which is simpler than the induction hypothesis-based proof. The sequention selection problem is shown to be a special case of the general ordering problem where the discount rate is zero. |
