Same Process, Different Outcomes: Group Performance in an Acquiring a Company Experiment

Marco Casari, Jingjing Zhang and Christine Jackson ()
Additional contact information
Christine Jackson: Purdue University

No 9614, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: It is still an open question when groups perform better than individuals in intellective tasks. We report that in an Acquiring a Company game, what prevailed when there was disagreement among group members was the median proposal and not the best proposal. This aggregation rule explains why groups underperformed with respect to a "truth wins" benchmark and why they performed better than individuals deciding in isolation in a simple version of the task but worse in the more difficult version. Implications are drawn on when to employ groups rather than individuals in decision making.

Keywords: winner's curse; group decision making; communication; risky shift; herd behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C92 D03 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2015-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Journal Article: Same process, different outcomes: group performance in an acquiring a company experiment (2016)
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