PEER EVALUATIONS AND TEAM PERFORMANCE: WHEN FRIENDS DO WORSE THAN STRANGERS

Peer evaluations and team performance: when friends do worse than strangers.

We use peer assessments as a tool to allocate joint profits in a real-effort team experiment. We find that using this incentive mechanism reduces team performance. More specifically, we show that teams composed of acquaintances rather than strangers actually underperform in a context of peer evaluations. We conjecture that peer evaluations undermine the inherently high level of intrinsic motiva...

Sharing Rewards Among Strangers Based on Peer Evaluations

W study a problem where a new, unfamiliar group of agents has to decide how a joint reward should be shared among them. We focus on settings where the share that each agent receives depends on the evaluations of its peers concerning that agent’s contribution to the group. We introduce a mechanism to elicit and aggregate evaluations as well as for determining agents’ shares. The intuition behind...

When Is Team Exam Performance a Better Measure of Learning than Individual Performance?

Failure Recovery: When the Cure Is Worse Than the Disease

Cloud services inevitably fail: machines lose power, networks become disconnected, pesky software bugs cause sporadic crashes, and so on. Unfortunately, failure recovery itself is often faulty; e.g. recovery can accidentally recursively replicate small failures to other machines until the entire cloud service fails in a catastrophic outage, amplifying a small cold into a contagious deadly plagu...

Commentary: when bad news is worse than it sounds.

In their study of a quarter century’s worth of English deaths attributed to cardiovascular disease (CVD), Dr Asaria and colleagues have unearthed a trend that is worse than they report it to be. What is new in Asaria et al.’s article is the reported trend in geographical inequalities in suffering and dying from this disease. However, these authors succumb to a very common error at the start of ...