Abstract
Many real world situations (potluck dinners, academic departments, sports teams, corporate divisions, committees, seminar classes, etc.) involve actors adjusting their contributions in order to achieve a mutually satisfactory group goal, a win-win result. However, the majority of human group research has involved situations where groups perform poorly because task constraints promote either individual maximization behavior or diffusion of responsibility, and even successful tasks generally involve the propagation of one correct solution through a group. Here we introduce a group task that requires complementary actions among participants in order to reach a shared goal. Without communication, group members submit numbers in an attempt to collectively sum to a randomly selected target number. After receiving group feedback, members adjust their submitted numbers until the target number is reached. For all groups, performance improves with task experience, and group reactivity decreases over rounds. Our empirical results provide evidence for adaptive coordination in human groups, and as the coordination costs increase with group size, large groups adapt through spontaneous role differentiation and self-consistency among members. We suggest several agent-based models with different rules for agent reactions, and we show that the empirical results are best fit by a flexible, adaptive agent strategy in which agents decrease their reactions when the group feedback changes. The task offers a simple experimental platform for studying the general problem of group coordination while maximizing group returns, and we distinguish the task from several games in behavioral game theory.
Highlights
Groups often struggle to balance incentives for individual members with incentives for the collective group
Numeric feedback games were solved significantly faster than directional feedback games, F(1,15) = 24.86, p,.001, presumably because the numeric feedback games allow individuals to more precisely modulate their reactions to the group feedback
Our results suggest that it is beneficial for members of large groups to differentiate themselves from each other and maintain those roles in order to foster a predictable environment for subsequent adjustment and coordination
Summary
Groups often struggle to balance incentives for individual members with incentives for the collective group. Conflicting incentives in real world situations such as pollution and harvesting of natural resources understandably stretch a group’s ability to coordinate for the common good, but it is still unclear how group members coordinate their actions in more constrained situations where only a shared goal exists. Humans routinely form groups to achieve goals that no individual can accomplish alone, and presumably groups must flexibly and adaptively coordinate members’ efforts in order to achieve shared goals. Statistical analyses in baseball and basketball increasingly value players based on the team’s performance while the player is in the game, rather than individual statistics such as points scored [3]
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