Seminar: Nişvan Erkal

Title: Information Provision with Milestones in Teamwork: External Governance versus Self Governance

Abstract: Many economic activities rely on teamwork where groups of individuals work together
for a common goal by pooling their resources or skills. Cooperation within teams can be
challenging due to the social dilemma problem. We study teamwork using a dynamic
public goods game where individuals make multiple contribution decisions to a team
project and face strategic uncertainty about the behavior of their team members. We study
whether providing feedback about the team’s progress at regular intervals (time-based
feedback) or based on the achievement of pre-determined milestones (milestone-based
feedback) is more beneficial for increasing aggregate contributions. Under external
governance, our results reveal that milestone-based feedback leads to a significant
increase in aggregate contributions as compared to time-based feedback. This result is
largely driven by conditional cooperators. Under self governance, majority of team
members demand time-based feedback. Moreover, it is the conditional cooperators who
are more likely to prefer time-based feedback. Our results provide guidance on how
information structures can be designed in team environments by showing that external
governance leads to higher cooperation rates.

Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82104395609?pwd=oTiwj7bsZJdL3iXh1Cl3HT6LofDKyx.1