Does consultation improve decision making?

Alessia Isopi (), Daniele Nosenzo and Chris Starmer ()
Additional contact information
Chris Starmer: School of Economics, University of Nottingham

No 2011-08, Discussion Papers from The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham

Abstract: This paper reports an experiment designed to test whether prior consultation within a group affects subsequent individual decision making in tasks where demonstrability of correct solutions is low. In our experiment subjects considered two paintings created by two different artists and were asked to guess which artist made each painting. We observed answers given by individuals under two treatments: in one, subjects were allowed the opportunity to consult with other participants before making their private decisions; in the other there was no such opportunity. Our primary findings are that subjects in the first treatment evaluate the opportunity to consult positively but they perform significantly worse and earn significantly less.

Keywords: Consultation; Decision making; Group decisions; Individual decisions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C92 D80 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-soc and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/cedex/documents/papers/2011-08.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does consultation improve decision-making? (2014)
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:not:notcdx:2011-08

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham School of Economics University of Nottingham University Park Nottingham NG7 2RD. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jose V Guinot Saporta ().