Autori
Egidi, Massimo
Narduzzo, A

Titolo
The Emergence of Path-Dependent Behaviors in Cooperative Contexts
Periodico
Università degli studi di Trento. CEEL - Computable and Experimental Economics Laboratory. Working papers
Anno: 1996 - Fascicolo: 4 - Pagina iniziale: 1 - Pagina finale: 1

The issue of path-dependence in organizational learning is explored by analyzing human behaviors in an artificial context in which many agents must cooperate to achieve a common goal without being allowed to use verbal communication. The artificial context is based on Transform the Target, a game created by M. Cohen and P. Bacdayan to explore in laboratory the emergence of rules of coordination and the routinization of behaviors. The game has very different starting configurations, depending on the card distributions. There exist two sub-optimal strategies which allow players to achieve the final goal by coordinating their efforts. The efficiency of each strategy, measured in terms of the (lowest) number of moves required to achieve the goal, depends upon the starting configuration: some initial configurations of the game can be more efficiently solved by one strategy, while others can be easily solved by the other. The working hypothesis of the experiment was that if a group of players was exposed to a set of preliminary runs characterized by starting configurations all of which could be easily solved by the same strategy, they could be "induced" to discover this solution more easily than the alternative one and to memorize it more deeply. To test this hypothesis two groups of players were asked to play a tournament. During the first part of the tournament (the training phase) every group was exposed to a set of starting configurations which could more easily be played using one strategy only. After the training phase both groups was exposed to the same (random) configurations. We observed the emergence of a persistent differentiation in players' behavior. The group of players exposed to a set of configurations which led more easily to one strategy continued to use it more frequently in the second part of the tournament, and symmetric behavior arose in the other group. Moreover in both groups there emerged a subset of players with strongly routinized behaviors, i.e. groups of players which, after the training phase, used one sub-optimal strategy for all runs of the tournament: they adopted a strategy once and for all and insisted on using it even when the configurations could not be efficiently played with the strategy adopted. These results are used to define precisely and test experimentally the degree of routinization in players' behaviors, the lock-in effect of the learning process, and the sub-optimality of routinized behaviors. While the experiment was based only on the observation of micro-behaviors, after the tournament subjects were required to verbalize their ideas about the strategies they adopted. Their answers permitted comparison between the micro behaviors and the "mental models" that emerged from verbalization. They explained routinization in terms of the triggering of actions induced by sets of condition-action rules, and they yielded data on the extent of tacitness. The paper ends with a brief exploration of the implications for both the cognitive microfoundations and the institutional aspects of the theory of the firm and organization.



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