Does Diversity Trump Ability?

When Does Diversity Trump Ability (and Vice Versa) in Group Decision Making? A Simulation Study

It is often unclear which factor plays a more critical role in determining a group's performance: the diversity among members of the group or their individual abilities. In this study, we addressed this "diversity vs. ability" issue in a decision-making task. We conducted three simulation studies in which we manipulated agents' individual ability (or accuracy, in the context of our investigatio...

Does Security Trump Reliability?

D oes security trump reliability, or vice versa? In 2013, the Seventh International Conference on Software Security and Reliability (SERE) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, hosted a panel discussion with representation from industry, academia, and government to answer this question. Neither the panelists nor anyone in the audience took a firm stance. Rather, the discussion meandered from the original ...

Does Consumer Irrationality Trump Consumer Sovereignty?

When Does Fast Recovery Trump High Reliability?

A widely accepted equation for availability is Availability=MTTF/(MTTF+MTTR), where MTTF is the mean time to failure of a system or subsystem (i.e. the reciprocal of reliability), MTTR is its mean time to recovery, and A is a number between 0 and 1. The equation suggests that to improve availability, a 10x decrease in MTTR (for example) is just as valuable as a 10x increase in MTTF, a founding ...

Discrimination in the lab: Does information trump appearance?

JEL classification: C92 J15 Using a laboratory experiment, we find evidence consistent with statistical discrimination in a public good and group formation game. In the game, payoff relevant information is presented to subjects, thereby making it costly to discriminate when choosing group members. We find that behavior is correlated with race and people use race to predict behavior. However, ra...