Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
论团队合作及其他聚合博弈中多样性的战略优势
On the Strategic Benefits of Diversity in Teamwork and other Aggregative Games
摘要
Can heterogeneity in team members’ ability levels confer benefits that enable heterogeneous teams to outperform homogeneous teams even when the latter are more skilled on average? Or do less capable individuals, as in Benabou (1996), drag down the productivities of more capable ones? This paper shows that, in aggregative games, such questions are fully tractable and that the answers depend on simple and economically interpretable conditions that weigh direct efficiency effects against individuals’ strategic adjustments to heterogeneity. The main results are qualitative and quantitative comparative statics results. The latter associate aggregate outcomes one-to-one with “diversity indices,” introduced here for the first time and shown always to exist given a reference population. These diversity indices turn out to be closely related to the inequality indices of Atkinson (1970) and Shorrocks (1980). In the main application to teamwork, heterogeneity in ability levels is shown to confer strategic benefits on teams under standard convexity assumptions.
中文摘要
团队成员能力水平的异质性是否能带来益处，使异质性团队即便在平均技能水平低于同质团队的情况下仍能超越后者？还是如贝纳布（1996）所述，能力较弱的个体会拖累能力较强者生产率？本文表明，在聚合博弈中，此类问题完全可处理，且答案取决于简单且具有经济学可解释性的条件，这些条件权衡直接效率效应与个体对异质性的策略性调整。主要结果是定性和定量比较静态结果。后者将聚合结果与“多样性指数”一一对应，该指数为本文首次引入，并证明在给定参照群体下始终存在。这些多样性指数与阿特金森（1970）和肖罗克斯（1980）的不平等指数密切相关。在针对团队合作的主要应用中，能力水平的异质性在标准凸性假设下被证明为团队带来策略性收益。