Collaborative Research on Team versus Individual Play

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We propose a series of experiments comparing the behavior of teams and individuals in decision-making. Many important decision-making environments involve groups or teams, yet much of the relevant theoretical and experimental work does not distinguish between team and individual decision making. Recent research shows large and important differences between team and individual behavior in settings where strategic interactions (and hence the ability to anticipate others' choices) are important. In such environments teams generate positive synergies, performing better than the sum of their parts. In addition, teams, unlike individuals, exhibit positive learning transfer, taking what they have learned in one game (e.g. a setting with strategic interactions) and applying it correctly in another related game. Our new experiments follow up on and extend these results. (1) In earlier work we have used dialogues between teammates to gain insight into how teams learn to act strategically. Comparable procedures will be implemented to study the learning processes of individuals and provide a basis of comparison with teams. (2) Previous work shows an important role for meaningful (as opposed to abstract) context in subjects' ability to apply what they have learned in one game to other related games. New experiments are proposed to better understand these processes. (3) In real world settings, team memberships change frequently. A third set of experiments is proposed to study how this affects the speed of learning to act strategically. (4) Research to date has focused on learning transfer between closely related games. We plan to study transfer between more distantly games. (5) Hidden profile problems - the apparent inability of team members with different information sets to pool their information to achieve more optimal decisions - have been studied extensively in the psychology literature. We plan to study whether providing clear incentives and better devices for remembering private information will alleviate these problems.