The Sharing Trap: Duplicate Work and Coordination in Teams

This paper studies costly information sharing in teams where members may duplicate one another's work. Members first decide whether to share their intended task assignments and then choose productive effort. Sharing allows a teammate to direct effort toward nonoverlapping tasks, while the sharer benefits only through complementary team production. This creates strategic complementarity in sharing and can sustain both a low-sharing, low-effort equilibrium and a high-sharing, high-effort equilibrium. The incentive to initiate sharing is strongest at an intermediate level of duplication risk: when duplication is limited, sharing prevents little wasted work; when duplication is severe, a lone sharer retains too little effective output to gain much from the teammate's response. Yet the value of coordinated sharing rises with duplication risk. A leader who shares first can select the high-sharing equilibrium, while larger teams may require a critical mass of initial sharers. The main equilibrium structure also survives with continuous sharing. The analysis identifies when communication platforms must be supplemented by visible first movers or coordinated initial participation to prevent duplicate work.