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

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

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Article ID: iaor20133837
Volume: 59
Issue: 6
Start Page Number: 1255
End Page Number: 1270
Publication Date: Jun 2013
Journal: Management Science
Authors: , , ,
Keywords: probability
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.

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