On the effect of social norms on performance in teams with distributed decision makers

TL;DR

This paper investigates how emergent social norms influence team performance in distributed decision-making settings, revealing that norms can hinder performance unless tasks are highly correlated, and confirming that team incentives boost performance on complex tasks.

Contribution

It introduces an agent-based NK-model to analyze social norms' impact on team performance, highlighting conditions where norms are beneficial or costly.

Findings

Social norms can reduce overall team performance unless tasks are highly correlated.

Sharing information about more tasks amplifies the effect of social norms.

Team incentives remain effective for complex tasks despite social norms.

Abstract

Social norms are rules and standards of expected behavior that emerge in societies as a result of information exchange between agents. This paper studies the effects of emergent social norms on the performance of teams. We use the NK-framework to build an agent-based model, in which agents work on a set of interdependent tasks and exchange information regarding their past behavior with their peers. Social norms emerge from these interactions. We find that social norms come at a cost for the overall performance, unless tasks assigned to the team members are highly correlated, and the effect is stronger when agents share information regarding more tasks, but is unchanged when agents communicate with more peers. Finally, we find that the established finding that the team-based incentive schemes improve performance for highly complex tasks still holds in presence of social norms.