IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/soceco/v39y2010i2p306-315.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Group diversity and salience: A natural experiment from a television game show

Author

Listed:
  • Bucci, Gabriella A.
  • Tenorio, Rafael

Abstract

We take advantage of a naturally occurring experiment in a television game show to study the impact of group characteristics on the group's ability to select salient solutions in a matching game. The Family Feud features families seeking to earn prizes by matching the results of public opinion surveys on various subjects. Our main result is that, controlling for task difficulty, families that are more diverse, as measured by both the intra-family generational gap and the relatedness of their members, are more successful at matching wider ranges of survey responses. This highlights the importance of member diversity in expanding information and decision frames of reference within a group.

Suggested Citation

  • Bucci, Gabriella A. & Tenorio, Rafael, 2010. "Group diversity and salience: A natural experiment from a television game show," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 39(2), pages 306-315, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:soceco:v:39:y:2010:i:2:p:306-315
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6W5H-4XNF42Y-1/2/8a4d9529ba9fb8c2ba769ba8a9d7453d
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Deborah Gladstein Ancona & David F. Caldwell, 1992. "Demography and Design: Predictors of New Product Team Performance," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 3(3), pages 321-341, August.
    2. Prat, Andrea, 2002. "Should a team be homogeneous?," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 46(7), pages 1187-1207, July.
    3. Mehta, Judith & Starmer, Chris & Sugden, Robert, 1994. "The Nature of Salience: An Experimental Investigation of Pure Coordination Games," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 84(3), pages 658-673, June.
    4. Sugden, Robert, 1995. "A Theory of Focal Points," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 105(430), pages 533-550, May.
    5. Becker, Gary S, 1973. "A Theory of Marriage: Part I," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 81(4), pages 813-846, July-Aug..
    6. Antonio S. Mello, 2006. "Team Composition," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 79(3), pages 1019-1040, May.
    7. L. Egghe, 2005. "Zipfian and Lotkaian continuous concentration theory," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 56(9), pages 935-945, July.
    8. Gruenfeld, Deborah H & Mannix, Elizabeth A. & Williams, Katherine Y. & Neale, Margaret A., 1996. "Group Composition and Decision Making: How Member Familiarity and Information Distribution Affect Process and Performance," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 67(1), pages 1-15, July.
    9. Heath, Chip & Ho, Ben & Berger, Jonah, 2006. "Focal points in coordinated divergence," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 27(5), pages 635-647, October.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Alós-Ferrer, Carlos & Kuzmics, Christoph, 2013. "Hidden symmetries and focal points," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 148(1), pages 226-258.
    2. Kyle Lewis, 2004. "Knowledge and Performance in Knowledge-Worker Teams: A Longitudinal Study of Transactive Memory Systems," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 50(11), pages 1519-1533, November.
    3. Blume, Andreas & Gneezy, Uri, 2010. "Cognitive forward induction and coordination without common knowledge: An experimental study," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 68(2), pages 488-511, March.
    4. Külpmann, Philipp & Khantadze, Davit, 2016. "Identifying the reasons for coordination failure in a laboratory experiment," Center for Mathematical Economics Working Papers 567, Center for Mathematical Economics, Bielefeld University.
    5. Choi, Hoon-Seok & Thompson, Leigh, 2005. "Old wine in a new bottle: Impact of membership change on group creativity," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 98(2), pages 121-132, November.
    6. Garicano, Luis & Hubbard, Thomas N., 2005. "Hierarchical sorting and learning costs: Theory and evidence from the law," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 58(2), pages 349-369, October.
    7. Jim Engle-Warnick & Sonia Laszlo & Natalia Mishagina & Erin C. Strumpf, 2013. "Coordination, Common Knowledge and an H1N1 Outbreak," CIRANO Working Papers 2013s-10, CIRANO.
    8. Lisa Bruttel & Tim Friehe, 2013. "Make Humans Randomize," Working Paper Series of the Department of Economics, University of Konstanz 2013-20, Department of Economics, University of Konstanz.
    9. Federica Alberti & Edward J. Cartwright, 2016. "Full agreement and the provision of threshold public goods," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 166(1), pages 205-233, January.
    10. Leland, Jonathan W. & Schneider, Mark, 2018. "A theory of focal points in 2 × 2 games," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 65(C), pages 75-89.
    11. Agnès Festré & Pierre Garrouste, 2012. "The ‘Economics of Attention’: A New Avenue of Research in Cognitive Economics," GREDEG Working Papers 2012-12, Groupe de REcherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG CNRS), Université Côte d'Azur, France.
    12. Blume, Andreas & Gneezy, Uri, 2000. "An Experimental Investigation of Optimal Learning in Coordination Games," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 90(1), pages 161-172, January.
    13. Bodoff, David, 2020. "The Power of Focal Points is Strong: Coordination Games with Labels and Payoffs," MPRA Paper 102213, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    14. Kets, Willemien & Kager, Wouter & Sandroni, Alvaro, 2022. "The value of a coordination game," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 201(C).
    15. Alessandro Sontuoso & Sudeep Bhatia, 2021. "A notion of prominence for games with natural‐language labels," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 12(1), pages 283-312, January.
    16. Stefania Sitzia & Jiwei Zheng, 2017. "Group behaviour in tacit coordination games with focal points: An experimental investigation," Working Paper series, University of East Anglia, Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) 17-02, School of Economics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK..
    17. Bardsley, Nicholas & Ule, Aljaž, 2017. "Focal points revisited: Team reasoning, the principle of insufficient reason and cognitive hierarchy theory," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 133(C), pages 74-86.
    18. Kets, Willemien & Sandroni, Alvaro, 2015. "Challenging Conformity: A Case for Diversity," MPRA Paper 68166, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    19. Irenaeus Wolff, 2014. "On the Salience-Based Level-k Model," TWI Research Paper Series 94, Thurgauer Wirtschaftsinstitut, Universität Konstanz.
    20. Heller, Yuval & Kuzmics, Christoph, 2024. "Communication, renegotiation and coordination with private values," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 143(C), pages 51-76.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:soceco:v:39:y:2010:i:2:p:306-315. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/620175 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.