Teams Make You Smarter: How Exposure to Teams Improves Individual Decisions in Probability and Reasoning Tasks

Boris Maciejovsky (), Matthias Sutter, David V. Budescu () and Patrick Bernau ()
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Boris Maciejovsky: Imperial College Business School, Imperial College London, London SW7 2AZ, United Kingdom
David V. Budescu: Fordham University, Bronx, New York 10458
Patrick Bernau: Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Köln, Germany; and University of Innsbruck, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria

Management Science, 2013, vol. 59, issue 6, 1255-1270

Abstract: Many important decisions are routinely made by transient and temporary teams, which perform their duty and disperse. Team members often continue making similar decisions as individuals. We study how the experience of team decision making affects subsequent individual decisions in two seminal probability and reasoning tasks, the Monty Hall problem and the Wason selection task. Both tasks are hard and involve a general rule, thus allowing for knowledge transfers, and can be embedded in the context of markets that offer identical incentives to teams and individuals. Our results show that teams trade closer to the rational level, learn the solution faster, and achieve this with weaker, less specific performance feedback than individuals. Most importantly, we observe significant knowledge transfers from team decision making to subsequent individual performances that take place up to five weeks later, indicating that exposure to team decision making has strong positive spillovers on the quality of individual decisions. This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.

Keywords: markets; group decision making; Wason selection task; Monty Hall dilemma; team decision making (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:59:y:2013:i:6:p:1255-1270

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