What Situation Is This? Shared Frames and Collective Performance
Name
stsc.2020.0120.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.24 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f53c18a6601ceb98e28d6bf602a86747
Author(s)
Gibbons, Robert
LiCalzi, Marco
Warglien, Massimo
Date Issued
2021
Journal
Strategy Science
Publisher
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
Citation
Gibbons, Robert, LiCalzi, Marco and Warglien, Massimo. 2021. "What Situation Is This? Shared Frames and Collective Performance." Strategy Science, 6 (2).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We study agents who distill the complex world around them using cognitive frames. We assume that agents share the same frame and analyze how the frame affects their collective performance. In one-shot and repeated interactions, the frame causes agents to be either better or worse off than if they could perceive the environment in full detail: it creates a fog of cooperation or a fog of conflict. In repeated interactions, the frame is as important as agents’ patience in determining the outcome: for a fixed discount factor, when all agents choose what they perceive as their best play, there remain significant performance differences induced by different frames. A low-performing team conducting a site visit to observe a high-performing team will be mystified, sometimes observing different actions than they expected or being given unexpected reasons for the actions they expected. Finally, we distinguish between incremental versus radical changes in frames, and we develop a model of category formation to analyze challenges faced by a leader who seeks to improve the agents’ collective performance.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1287/STSC.2020.0120
