Project Networks and Reallocation Externalities

• 成果类型: Article; Early Access
• 署名作者: Dhingra, Vibhuti; Krishnan, Harish; Serpa, Juan Camilo
• 署名单位: York University - Canada; University of British Columbia; McGill University
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2022.01574
• 发表日期: 2025
• 关键词: Government procurement; network effects; empirical operations; project management

摘要

A project involves several participants-including clients, contractors, and subcontractors-that work concurrently on multiple projects and allocate resources among them. This interdependency creates a network of otherwise-unrelated projects. We map the network of U.S. government projects involving over 150,000 participants. We show that a seemingly localized disruption, affecting only one project site, eventually causes delays across unrelated projects. This is because participants opportunistically reallocate resources into disrupted projects, at the expense of other projects, triggering a domino effect of further reallocations in the network. Thus, the costs of on-site disruptions end up being shared by multiple participants in the network, rather than being fully absorbed by the affected project. Performance-based incentives, which reward contractors for timeliness, exacerbate these externalities by encouraging self-interested resource reallocation.