Are Two Heads Better Than One?: An Experimental Analysis of Group vs. Individual Decisionmaking

Alan Blinder and John Morgan

No 7909, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Two laboratory experiments - one a statistical urn problem, the other a monetary policy experiment - were run to test the commonly-believed hypothesis that groups make decisions more slowly than individuals do. Surprisingly, this turns out not to be true there is no significant difference in average decision lags. Furthermore, and also surprisingly, there is no significant difference in the decision lag when groups decisions are made by majority rule versus when they are made under a unanimity requirement. In addition, group decisions are on average superior to individual decisions. The results are strikingly similar across the two experiments.

JEL-codes: E5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-09
Note: ME
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (48)

Published as Blinder, Alan S. and John Morgan. "Are Two Heads Better Than One? Monetary Policy By Committee," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 2005, v37(5,Oct), 789-811.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7909.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Are Two Heads Better Than One?: An Experimental Analysis of Group vs. Individual Decisionmaking (2001)
Working Paper: Are Two Heads Better than One?: An Experimental Analysis of Group vs. Individual Decisionmaking (2000)
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:nbr:nberwo:7909

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7909

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().