Abstract
This article studies the effects of the introduction of artificial intelligence into teams in a laboratory experiment. We randomly assign automated co-workers into “laboratory firms” who are playing a team-based game on the Nintendo Switch console. We demonstrate that even in a task where AI outperforms humans, automation decreases overall team performance and increases coordination failures. These effects are especially large in the short-term and in low- and medium-skilled teams. Moreover, automation reduces team trust and individual effort provision. Our results support the implication that improving collaborative human-machine teams is key to the positive transformation that AI may bring to organizations.
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© 2023 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
2023
The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
