Cognitive challenges in human-AI collaboration: Investigating the path towards productive delegation

Andreas Fügener, Jörn Grahl, Alok Gupta and Wolfgang Ketter

ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam

Abstract: We study how humans make decisions when they collaborate with an artificial intelligence (AI): each instance of a classification task could be classified by themselves or by the AI. Experimental results suggest that humans and AI who work together can outperform the superior AI when it works alone. However, this only occurred when the AI delegated work to humans, not when humans delegated work to the AI. The AI profited, even from working with low-performing subjects, but humans did not delegate well. This bad delegation performance cannot be explained with algorithm aversion. On the contrary, subjects tried to follow a provided delegation strategy diligently and appeared to appreciate the AI support. However, human results suffered due to a lack of metaknowledge. They were not able to assess their own capabilities correctly, which in turn leads to poor delegation decisions. In contrast to reluctance to use AI, lacking metaknowledge is an unconscious trait. It limits fundamentally how well human decision makers can collaborate with AI and other algorithms. The results have implications for the future of work, the design of human-AI collaborative environments and education in the digital age.

Keywords: Future of work; Artificial Intelligence; Deep Learning; Machine Learning; Deep Learning; Human-AI Collaboration; Machine Learning; Intelligent Software Agents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39
Date: 2019-04-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-cmp, nep-exp and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repub.eur.nl/pub/115830/ERS-2019-003-LIS_v1.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ems:eureri:115830

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ERIM Report Series Research in Management from Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePub (peter.vanhuisstede@eur.nl this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).