Abstract
We consider tasks where in order to perform them it is sufficient that one member of a group will know how to do it. We are interested in the effect of task difficulty, and variability of that difficulty, on group performance, and in particular on the marginal contribution of an additional number to the performance of groups of different size. We explore the implications of various stochastic orders over task difficulty and variability. Some intuitive conjectures are shown to be false.
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The second author would like to thank NSERC, K-C Wang Foundation, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for their financial supports to this research.
Yigal Gerchak is a Professor and Head of the department of Industrial Engineering at Tel-Aviv University. Prior to that he spent many years at the University of Waterloo, Canada. His main current research interests are coordination in decentralized supply chains, risk-pooling and final offer arbitration. He is a Department Editor of IIE Transactions.
Qi-Ming He is an associate professor in the Industrial Engineering Department of Dalhousie University. His main research areas are algorithmic methods in applied probability, queueing theory and inventory management. Recently, he is working on queueing systems with multiple types of customers and inventory systems with multiple types of demands.
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Gerchak, Y., He, QM. Group size and parallelism effects in tasks with heterogeneous levels of difficulty: A stochastic order approach. J. Syst. Sci. Syst. Eng. 13, 36–44 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11518-006-0152-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11518-006-0152-4