Abstract: While several areas of organizational research have benefited from the use of games to study interaction between individuals, one area that has not done so is the study of organizational coordination. This is in spite of the large game-theoretic literature on coordination games and solutions to coordination problems. This paper brings the two approaches together, showing how simple games can be used to represent different problems of organizational interdependence and how game-theoretic solutions to coordination problems are related to organizational solutions. I.

this paper, we report on distributed group-to-group collaboration in the domain of space mission design. The nature of the task---conceptual space mission design---is highly complex. Design has been characterized as an illdefined problem (e.g. Carroll 2000). As a result, it requires much negotiation and articulation as design tradeoffs are discussed. Collocated environments are advantageous for designers not only because they provide awareness of the state of the design (Robertson, 1997) but they also enable designers to have immediate access to others, e.g. to question the relevancy of a requirement, to negotiate design tradeoffs, to collectively "walk through" the design and discuss discrepancies. A distributed environment makes these activities more difficult. Furthermore, in an arena with multiple teams and sites, the difficulty of accessing another designer is even more compounded

Evidence from psychology, Fischhoff (1975), and economics, Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber (1989), confirms that people systematically exaggerate the extent to which their private information is available to others. I present a general model of such information projection, and apply it to a variety of settings. When assessing an expert’s competence using ex-post information, jurors overweigh how much they learn from failed predictions and underweigh how much they learn from successful ones. As a result, they underestimate the competence of experts on average. To defend their reputation, experts are too reluctant to base predictions on ex-ante information that complements, and too eager to base predictions on ex-ante information that substitutes, for what jurors independently learn ex-post. Optimal monitoring is coarser and career incentives are weaker than under Bayesian assumptions. A commitment to asymmetric, rather than symmetric, performance measures can significantly reduce defensive practices. Communication protocols that encourage experts to talk, but restrict the use of messages that complement the speaker’s expertise, reduce favoritism and strictly improve welfare.

Prior experimental evidence finds decentralized pre-play communication to facilitate efficient coordination among interdependent agents. However, the kind of communication in these experiments is unrealistic for most organizational contexts, as it consists of costless messages from every agent, which are sent every time a coordination game is played. We study how communication use and its effectiveness change when one considers that sending messages is often both costly and voluntary, and investigate the effectiveness of alternative communication policies employed by a firm. The policies differ in the degree to which message use is voluntary and in who bears the costs for communication. Imposing even small communication costs on employees dramatically reduces message use, but efficient coordination occurs more frequently when the proportion of message costs borne by employees is small. We conclude that under certain conditions, large but incomplete subsidies for using communication can be an optimal solution for obtaining efficient coordination in firms.

The competitive survival of many organizations depends on delivering projects on time and on budget. These firms face decisions concerning how to scale the size of work teams. Larger teams can usually complete tasks more quickly, but the advantages associated with adding workers are often accompanied by various disadvantages (such as the increased burden of coordinating efforts). We note several reasons why managers may focus on process gains when they envision the consequences of making a team larger, and why they may underestimate or underweight process losses. We document a phenomenon that we term the team scaling fallacy—as team size increases, people increasingly underestimate the number of labor hours required to complete projects. Using data from two laboratory experiments, and archival data from projects executed at a software company, we find persistent evidence of the team scaling fallacy and explore a reason for its occurrence.

Decades of research using a wide variety of detailed plant- and firm-level data has provided strong evidence of persistent performance differences among seemingly similar enterprises (hereafter, PPDs among SSEs). Bartelsman and Doms (2000) reviewed the sizeable initial literature on this issue, and a recent review by Syverson (2011) highlighting much new research