Field expectations and the determination of wildcat drilling

There is currently some dissatisfaction with macroeconomic approaches to modeling the supply of domestic crude oil. One problem that has been pointed out is that the estimated supply responses of new discoveries brought about by price increases appear to be unrealistically high. Because data  frequently  used in these models  are highly aggregated over time and include diverse geologic regions, this criticism may not be unwarranted.  Moreover, with highly aggregated data testable hypotheses relating to operator behavior at the field level are limited. Because of the somewhat decentralized  nature of firm decision making, operator field behavior significantly affects the wildcat drilling rate and hence the interarrival times, i.e., temporal sequence, of expected discoveries.