All I can say is that I’m humbled and honored to be your friend. This is ridiculously great research.

I have a feeling that the information I was looking for directly on point is probably buried in some combat doctrine military journal somewhere. It was a throw-away line in a book I read, that two-person fire teams are four times as effective (in killing people) than a single shooter, because with two people working as a team, you can do things like cover the flanks/rear, lay down suppressing fire, move while being covered by the partner, and do flanking maneuvers of your own. It makes intuitive sense, but I wanted to find the research for that 4x claim.

The germination of the idea is, I wonder if that works outside of military context. If a real estate agents teams up with just one other realtor, do they become four times as effective? What about three agents teaming up? Do they double in effectiveness again, to 8x? Or a smaller marginal gain?

I know I’ve seen literature talking about this, how adding a 400th person to a 399-man team is only very slight increase in marginal effectiveness, while going from one person to two people is a HUGE gain.

-rsh