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

“这项奖励是根据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，由一群决策者做出的决定比个人做出的决定要好，因此有句谚语叫“三个臭皮匠，胜过一个诸葛亮”。在先前的研究中，首席调查员发现，当决策涉及与其他群体或个人的战略互动时，情况就是如此。另一种情况是，当团队中的一个成员获得了解决问题所需的基本洞察力时，他们可以很容易地向其他人解释答案（所谓的“尤里卡”型问题），人们可能会预期团队会比个人做得更好。在这些情况下，似乎团队应该与最佳成员单独行动的速度一样快，或者由于团队成员之间的积极协同作用（“集合奖金”）而更快地获得相同的见解。然而，心理学文献中的研究表明，情况通常并非如此。（Kerr and Tindale, 2004）。拟议的研究测试了几个假设，即为什么两个头脑在战略经济/商业环境中比一个头脑好，但在解决问题的领域却不是这样。它还进一步探讨了群体绩效优势的起源，并详细介绍了战略设置中使用的决策过程。为了实现这些目标，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，拍卖中的出价和个人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).