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...

The need for efficient coordination is ubiquitous in organizations and industries. The literature on the determinants of efficient coordination has focused on individual decision-making so far. In reality, however, teams often have to coordinate with other teams. We present an experiment with...

We study the effect of team decision-making on bubbles and crashes in experimental asset markets of the kind introduced by Smith, Suchanek and Williams (1988). We find that populating such markets with teams of size two instead of individuals significantly reduces the severity of mispricing. In...

"Among economists, there is increased recognition of the role individuals' identities play in decision-making. In this paper, we conduct laboratory experiments in which we explore the motivations for and the effects of group identity. We find that negative out-group opinion (acting as an...

We present an experiment on strategic thinking and behavior of individuals and teams in one-shot normal-form games. Besides making choices, decision makers have to state their first- and second-order beliefs. We find that teams play the Nash strategy significantly more often, and their choices...

We study the impact of team decision making on market behavior and its consequences for subsequent individual performance in the Wason selection task, the single-most studied reasoning task. We reformulated the task in terms of "assets" in a market context. Teams of traders learn the task's...

In this paper, we examine the determinants of decision-making power by children and young adolescents. Moving beyond previous economic models that treat children as goods consumed by adults rather than agents, we develop a noncooperative model of parental control of child behavior and child...

We use a laboratory gift-exchange game to examine decisions made by groups under three different procedures that dictate how group members interact and reach decisions in comparison to individuals acting alone. We find that group decisions do deviate from those of individuals, but the direction...

We consider the problem of sequential search when the decision to stop searching is made by a committee. We show that a symmetric stationary equilibrium exists and is unique given that the distribution of rewards is log concave. Committee members set a lower acceptance threshold than do...

The population of most developed societies is 'graying'. As life expectancy increases and the large baby-boom generation approaches retirement age, this has critical consequences for maintaining a high standard of living and the sustainability of pension systems. In the light of these...