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Silence is Golden: Communication Costs and Team Problem Solving

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  • Charness, Gary
  • Cooper, David
  • Grossman, Zachary

Abstract

Numerous studies have compared the performance of individuals and teams at solving intellective problems. The ubiquitous finding in the economics literature is that teams out-perform individuals. This result is intuitively appealing, as teams can benefit from sharing insights. We analyze experiments comparing the performance of teams and individuals at solving a series of challenging logic puzzles. Contrary to the existing literature, individuals meet or exceed the performance of teams on all measures. If we impose a small cost of communication on teams, the performance of teams improves to closely resemble the performance of individuals. Underlying these results is a definite negative relationship between frequency of communication and team performance. We also document a strong gender effect. Teams with more women perform considerably better even though men slightly outperform women when solving the puzzles individually.

Suggested Citation

  • Charness, Gary & Cooper, David & Grossman, Zachary, 2015. "Silence is Golden: Communication Costs and Team Problem Solving," University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series qt3n25b620, Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara.
    • Handle: RePEc:cdl:ucsbec:qt3n25b620
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Gary Charness & Martin Dufwenberg, 2011. "Participation," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(4), pages 1211-1237, June.
    2. Jordi Brandts & David J. Cooper, 2007. "It's What You Say, Not What You Pay: An Experimental Study of Manager–Employee Relationships in Overcoming Coordination Failure," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 5(6), pages 1223-1268, December.
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    10. Charness, Gary & Karni, Edi & Levin, Dan, 2010. "On the conjunction fallacy in probability judgment: New experimental evidence regarding Linda," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 68(2), pages 551-556, March.
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    Cited by:

    1. Gary Charness & David J. Cooper & Zachary Grossman, 2020. "Silence is golden: team problem solving and communication costs," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 23(3), pages 668-693, September.
    2. Erik O. Kimbrough & Andrew D. McGee & Hitoshi Shigeoka, 2022. "How Do Peers Impact Learning? An Experimental Investigation of Peer-to-Peer Teaching and Ability Tracking," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 57(1), pages 304-339.
    3. Marco Casari & Jingjing Zhang & Christine Jackson, 2016. "Same process, different outcomes: group performance in an acquiring a company experiment," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 19(4), pages 764-791, December.

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    Keywords

    Social and Behavioral Sciences; teams; communication; experimental economics;
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