TY  - JOUR
AU  - Blinder,Alan S.
AU  - Morgan,John
TI  - Are Two Heads Better Than One?: An Experimental Analysis of Group vs. Individual Decisionmaking
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 7909
PY  - 2000
Y2  - September 2000
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7909
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7909.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Alan S. Blinder
Department of Economics
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544-1021
Tel: 609/258-3358
Fax: 609/258-5398
E-Mail: blinder@princeton.edu

John Morgan
Haas School, UC, Berkeley
545 Student Services Building, #1900
Berkeley, CA 94720-1900
E-Mail: morgan@haas.berkeley.edu
AB  - Two laboratory experiments - one a statistical urn problem, the other a monetary policy experiment - were run to test the commonly-believed hypothesis that groups make decisions more slowly than individuals do.  Surprisingly, this turns out not to be true   there is no significant difference in average decision lags.  Furthermore, and also surprisingly, there is no significant difference in the decision lag when groups decisions are made by majority rule versus when they are made under a unanimity requirement.  In addition, group decisions are on average superior to individual decisions.  The results are strikingly similar across the two experiments.
ER  -