We study the phenomenon of strategic polarization in group interactions. Agents with private preferences choose a public action (e.g., voice opinions), and the mean of their actions represents the group’s realized outcome. They face a trade-off between influencing the group outcome and...

Many politically and economically important groups are themselves comprised of groups. Examples of such multilevel group structures include coalition governments, labor confederations and multinational agreements. This paper develops a model of multilevel group structures. The results establish...

Group contests are ubiquitous. Some examples include warfare between countries, competition between political parties, team-incentives within firms, group sports, and rent-seeking. In order to succeed, members of the same group have incentives to cooperate with each other by expending individual...

We test whether a descriptive norm-nudge is a suitable policy tool to increase cooperation in a social dilemma when decisions are taken by teams, not individuals. 10 Each team in our experiment comes from a different fishing boat at Lake Victoria, Tanzania. The provision of a norm-nudge is...

Successful innovation requires teams to embrace and enact change. However, team members often differ in their preferences for change. We examine how regulatory focus affects dyadic teams’ tendencies to enact change across an array of repeated brand management decisions. Understanding such...

We report an experiment examining risk taking and information aggregation in groups. Group members come to the table with an individual preference for a choice under risk, based on privately received information, and can share this information with fellow group members. They then make a decision...

Using an experiment with incentivized decisions of groups in the economics laboratory, I investigate the effect of group diversity on group risk taking. I measure econometrically the effects of various aspects of subjects' diversity: nationality, language, university degree and gender. I find...

We report a controlled laboratory experiment examining risk-taking and information aggregation in groups facing a common risk. The experiment allows us to examine how subjects respond to new information, in the form of both privately observed signals and signals reported from others. We find...

Economists are increasingly interested in how group membership affects individual behavior. The standard method assigns individuals to “minimal” groups, i.e. arbitrary labels, in a lab. But real groups often involve social interactions leading to social ties between group members. Our...

This paper analyses data collected in 2012 and 2013 at the ESSEC Business School from Kallystée, a proprietary mass-attendance business game. Company boards are simulated by teams of five students selected at random. The design manipulates the gender composition of the boards to allow for all...