Join Me with the Weakest Partner, Please

This paper considers the problem of self-interested agents engaged in costly exploration when individual findings benefit all agents. The purpose of the exploration is to reason about the nature and value of the different opportunities available to the agents whenever such information is a priori unknown. While the problem has been considered for the case where the goal is to maximize the overall expected benefit, the focus of this paper is on settings where the agents are self-interested, i.e, each agent´s goal is to maximize its individual expected benefit. The paper presents an equilibrium analysis of the model, considering both mixed and pure equilibria. The analysis is used to demonstrate two somehow non-intuitive properties of the equilibrium cooperative exploration strategies used by the agents and their resulting expected payoffs: (a) when using mixed equilibrium strategies, the agents might lose due to having more potential opportunities available for them in their environment, and (b) if the agents can have additional agents join them in the exploration they might prefer the less competent ones to join the process.