Collective Progress: Dynamics of Exit Waves

TL;DR

This paper models collective search dynamics, revealing how agents' search behaviors and scope adjustments lead to endogenous exit waves, with implications for understanding coordinated decision-making in team searches.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model of collective search with endogenous exit waves, characterizing equilibrium and optimal policies, and explaining coordinated stopping behavior.

Findings

Endogenous exit waves emerge from collective search dynamics.

Search scope remains constant until a departure, then declines.

A simple drawdown boundary governs individual search termination.

Abstract

We study a model of collective search by teams. Discoveries beget discoveries and correlated search results are governed by a Brownian path. Search results' variation at any point -- the search scope -- is jointly controlled. Agents individually choose when to cease search and implement their best discovery. We characterize equilibrium and optimal policies. Search scope is constant and independent of search outcomes as long as no member leaves. It declines after departures. A simple drawdown stopping boundary governs each agent's search termination. We show the emergence of endogenous exit waves, whereby possibly heterogeneous agents cease search all at once.