Date: October 06, 2016 at 09:30 – 10:45 am.
Location: Lakeside Park, Building B04b, Level 1, Klagenfurt (Lakeside Labs)
Paul Schweinzer (Professor for Economics, Klagenfurt) will talk about:
Optimal Team Composition and the Apollo Syndrome
We model leadership, competition, and decision making in teams with heterogeneous membership composition. We show that if the choice of leadership in a team is imprecise or noisy — which is arguably the case if appointment decisions are made not only by experts but also by less well-informed executives — then it is not necessarily the case that the best individuals should be selected into a single team. On the contrary, and in line with what has been called the “Apollo effect,” a team consisting of unambiguously higher performing individuals may perform worse in terms of team output than a group composed of lower performers. We characterize the properties of the leadership selection process which lead to the Apollo effect and clarify when the opposite effect — in which supertalent teams perform better than comparatively less qualified groups — takes place.
Joint work with Alex Gershkov.
Self-Organizing Systems 