On Monday, March 6 ISET hosted its graduate Robizon Khubulashvili, a Ph.D. Student of Pennsylvania State University. Robizon presented his working paper entitled “Endogenous Team Formation Among Competitors”.

In this paper, Robizon analyzed endogenous group formation when competition among teammates is a concern. He showed an algorithm that could be used to find an equilibrium in which all the members of the competitors' group want to be in the group and want to exchange their information with every other member of the group.

Robizon also had answers to some interesting questions from group theory and organizational economics. First, he characterized conditions under which team managers should improve weak players of the team; the interesting result was that even if one player is more important than another, there is a strong incentive to improve the less important player. He also showed that a team with homogeneous members has a higher expected value than an average ability team with more heterogeneous members. Finally, Robizon addressed matching problems and discussed the allocation of agents in pairs.

Robizon Khubulashvili is ISET’s graduate from the class of 2013. After graduation, for a brief amount of time, he worked for the ISET Policy Institute but then left the organization after being admitted to Pennsylvania State University. His main research interests are microeconomics, game theory, and mechanism design among many others.