Same process, different outcomes : group performance in an acquiring a company experimen

Marco Casari (University of Bologna and IZA), Jingjing Zhang (University of Technology Sydney), Christine Jackson (Purdue University)

It is still an open question when groups perform better than individuals in intellective tasks. We report that in an Acquiring a Company game, what prevailed when there was disagreement among group members was the median proposal and not the best proposal. This aggregation rule explains why groups underperformed with respect to a "truth wins" benchmark and why they performed better than individuals deciding in isolation in a simple version of the task but worse in the more difficult version. Implications are drawn on when to employ groups rather than individuals in decision making.

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Year of publication:	December 2015
Authors:	Casari, Marco ; Zhang, Jingjing ; Jackson, Christine
Publisher:	Bonn : IZA
Subject:	winner's curse \| group decision making \| communication \| risky shift \| herd behavior \| Gruppenentscheidung \| Group decision-making \| Herdenverhalten \| Herding \| Arbeitsgruppe \| Team \| Experiment \| Übernahme \| Takeover