Does communicating within a team influence individuals’ reasoning and decisions?

Arad, Ayala, Grubiak, Kevin P. and Penczynski, Stefan P. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5477-6830 (2024) Does communicating within a team influence individuals’ reasoning and decisions? Experimental Economics, 27. 109–129. ISSN 1386-4157

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Abstract

In recent years, experimental economics has seen a rise in the collection and analysis of choice process data, such as team communication transcripts. The main purpose of this paper is to understand whether the collection of team communication data influences how individuals reason and behave as they enter the team deliberation process, i.e. before any communication exchange. Such an influence would imply that team setups have limited validity to speak to individual reasoning processes. Our treatment manipulations allow us to isolate the effects of (1) belonging to a team, (2) actively suggesting an action to the team partner, and (3) justifying the suggestion in a written text to the team partner. Across three different tasks, we find no systematic evidence of changed suggestions and altered individual sophistication due to changes in aspects (1)-(3) of our experimental design. We thus find no threat to said validity of team setups. In addition to investigating how the team setup affects individual behavior before communication, we also investigate the sophistication of decisions after the communication. We find that sophisticated strategies are more persuasive than unsophisticated strategies, especially when communication includes written justifications, thereby explaining why teams are more sophisticated and proving rich communication to be fruitful.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: Author acknowledgements: We thank Eli Zvuluni (Possible Worlds Ltd.) for programming the experiment and Rom Severin for research assistance. We also thank the editor, two anonymous referees as well as seminar participants at the UEA CBESS Text Analysis Workshop 2020, the CBESS seminar series and the annual meeting of the German Association for Experimental Economic Research (GfeW) 2021 for their helpful comments. We acknowledge financial support from The Coller Foundation, The Henry Crown Institute of Business Research in Israel, and The Raya Strauss Center for Family Business Research.
Uncontrolled Keywords: b41,c92,choice processes,d01,d70,individual reasoning,persuasion,team communication,economics, econometrics and finance (miscellaneous) ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/2000/2001
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Economics
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Behavioural Economics
Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Sciences
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Depositing User: LivePure Connector
Date Deposited: 09 Jan 2023 13:32
Last Modified: 18 Mar 2024 10:30
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/90479
DOI: 10.1007/s10683-022-09786-3

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