Group size and parallelism effects in tasks with heterogeneous levels of difficulty: A stochastic order approach

Abstract

We consider tasks where in order to perform them it is sufficient that one member of a group will know how to do it. We are interested in the effect of task difficulty, and variability of that difficulty, on group performance, and in particular on the marginal contribution of an additional number to the performance of groups of different size. We explore the implications of various stochastic orders over task difficulty and variability. Some intuitive conjectures are shown to be false.

Keywords

Management / stochastic comparison

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