The cost of coordination can exceed the benefit of collaboration in performing complex tasks

TL;DR

This study investigates when group decision-making outperforms individuals, revealing that coordination costs often outweigh benefits unless tasks are complex and partners are well-trained.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on how training, task complexity, and coordination costs influence collective decision-making performance.

Findings

Dyads improve over time but rarely outperform individuals.

Coordination costs often outweigh the benefits of collaboration.

Expertise improves accuracy in complex tasks.

Abstract

Humans and other intelligent agents often rely on collective decision making based on an intuition that groups outperform individuals. However, at present, we lack a complete theoretical understanding of when groups perform better. Here we examine performance in collective decision-making in the context of a real-world citizen science task environment in which individuals with manipulated differences in task-relevant training collaborated. We find 1) dyads gradually improve in performance but do not experience a collective benefit compared to individuals in most situations; 2) the cost of coordination to efficiency and speed that results when switching to a dyadic context after training individually is consistently larger than the leverage of having a partner, even if they are expertly trained in that task; and 3) on the most complex tasks having an additional expert in the dyad who is adequately trained improves accuracy. These findings highlight that the extent of training received by an individual, the complexity of the task at hand, and the desired performance indicator are all critical factors that need to be accounted for when weighing up the benefits of collective decision-making.