Inspection in networks (temporary name)

Large research institutions and technologically innovative firms frequently use several research teams, partially overlapping in their expertise, to complete a given set of tasks. In such organizations it seems plausible that while the institutional goal is to complete the tasks as quickly as possible, the teams' goal is to collect as many credits on projects' completions as possible. We study this setting as an optimal sequential search problem from two perspectives - the planner's (i.e. the organization's) problem and the agents' (i.e. the teams') problem. We characterize the optimal behavior of the planner and the subgame perfect equilibrium of the agents' game under certain conditions and we show that they are rarely aligned.  

Joint with Francis Bloch, Lilian Hartmann & Luca Merlino.