Specialists and generalists: Equilibrium skill acquisition decisions in problem-solving populations

Specialists make faster decisions than generalists: experiments with aphids

Theoretical studies and a few recent experimental reports suggest that the evolution of diet breadth in herbivorous insects is constrained by a limited neural ability to e¤ciently process large amounts of information in short periods of time. This neural-constraints hypothesis predicts that generalist herbivores should make slower or poorer decisions than specialists when selecting plants, beca...

Task Assignments and Incentives: Generalists versus Specialists∗

I develop an agency model of job assignments where jobs differ based on the breadth of tasks. A tradeoff between task complementarities and relative abilities of workers results in those with balanced skills being assigned to multi-task jobs. The same tradeoff between complementarities and relative abilities also influences incentives to sort privately informed workers to jobs. I then draw on a...

Generalists vs Specialists in Indian Administration

For the policy-implementing part of his job, the administrator has to be a coordinator, which is a generalist function. At the policy-implementing stage, he needs to be a generalist in the sense of feeding extra-disciplinary valuejudgments, culled from his wide administrative experience, into the decision-making process. But, at the same time, for policyformulation he had to master specialised ...

Problem-solving Skill in the Social Sciences

A Continuum of Specialists and Generalists in Empirical Communities

Understanding the persistence of specialists and generalists within ecological communities is a topical research question, with far-reaching consequences for the maintenance of functional diversity. Although theoretical studies indicate that restricted conditions may be necessary to achieve co-occurrence of specialists and generalists, analyses of larger empirical (and species-rich) communities...