The School of Economics invites you to a seminar presented by David Cooper (Economic Policy Institute).

Co-authors:

Krista Saral (Webster University)

Marie Claire Villeval (National Center for Scientific Research)

Abstract

There is still little understanding of the reasons for joining teams. We designed an experiment to explore whether the willingness to teach others may explain the decision of more able individuals to form a
team with a less able co-worker. Several treatments of a real-effort task vary the possibility to communicate with the co-worker, the nature of the payment scheme, the stability of the pair matching, and the availability of teaching hints. We found that more able individuals are much less likely to join teams when they have to share revenue, and removing the right to communicate reduces even further their willingness to join teams. Their willingness to join teams is positively influenced by the opportunity to teach the co-worker, mainly for strategic reasons, i.e., when teams are stable and team members have to share revenue. Surprisingly, not all less able individuals are willing to join teams, perhaps to avoid peer pressure, and the proportion of those willing to join is stable across treatments.