Collaborative Search for a Public Good

Abstract

This paper studies costly sequential search among risky alternatives performed by a team of agents. Compared to the socially optimal protocol, the team uses the same search order and stopping rule. However, due to free-riding, search in teams leads to a delay at each stage of the learning process. Consequently, the team manager prefers to delegate the search to an individual agent. In contrast, every agent prefers searching with a partner since she collects the same reward but only pays the search cost half the time.