It would be useful to be able to set cost/time caps for specific queries within threads and threads overall when using the Research (and Research Experimental, albeit currently in beta) assistant. This could dictate the effort the assistant goes to fulfil your query to a granularity that prompts alone cannot necessarily achieve.
For example, I could ask the Research assistant to find literature on a given topic and dictate the sufficiency of that research by specifying that the assistant should spend ten minutes and $3 worth of tokens looking for it. This would prevent over- and under-searching by forcing the assistant to spend a certain amount of money and time to find and ponder the desired information.
When I want the assistant to try really hard on a particular query, I feel like this feature would allow me to explicitly signal how hard I want it to try. It is a sort of analogue for asking a person to research something — instead of thinking about the time and thereby salary spent, I am thinking about the time spent/tokens expended and thereby the credits spent.
