Collaborative Research: Experimental Studies on Group Decision Making in Strategic Environments

“该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。人们普遍认为，决策者群体做出的决定比个人做出的决定要上级，因此有句谚语说：“两个脑袋比一个脑袋好。““在先前的研究中，首席研究员发现，当决策涉及与其他群体或个人的战略互动时，情况就是这样。另一种情况是，人们可能会预期群体会比个人做得更好，一旦群体中的一个成员获得解决问题所需的基本洞察力，他们就可以很容易地向其他人解释答案（所谓的“尤里卡”型问题）。在这种情况下，团队似乎应该像最好的成员单独行动一样快地达到同样的洞察力，或者由于团队成员之间的积极协同作用（“装配奖金”）而更快。 然而，心理学文献的研究表明，情况通常并非如此。(Kerr和Tindale，2004年）。 拟议的研究测试几个假设，为什么两个头出现在战略经济/商业环境中，而不是在解决问题的域比一个更好。它还进一步探讨了群体绩效优势的起源，并详细介绍了战略环境中使用的决策过程。 为了追求这些目标，个人和群体的行为将在几个新的，重要的问题类别中进行研究（例如，拍卖中的投标和群体之间的讨价还价）。

"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."It is widely believed that decisions arrived at by groups of decision makers are superior to those made by individuals, hence the common aphorism that "two heads are better than one." In prior research the Principal Investigators found that this is the case when the decisions involve strategic interactions with other groups or individuals.Another type of situation where one might anticipate that groups would do better than individuals is in problems where once one member of the group gains the essential insight needed to solve the problem they can easily explain the answer to others (so called "eureka" type problems). In these situations, it would seem that the group should reach the same insight as fast as its best member would acting alone, or faster due to positive synergies (an "assembly bonus") among group members. However, research in the psychology literature shows that this is typically not the case. (Kerr and Tindale, 2004). The proposed research tests several hypotheses as to why two heads appear better than one in strategic economic/business environments but not in the problem-solving domain. It also further explores the origins of group performance advantage and details the decision making processes used in strategic settings. To pursue these objectives, behavior of individuals and groups will be examined in several new, important, classes of problems (e.g., bidding in auctions and bargaining between groups of individuals).