Team Formation with Complementary Skills
Assistant Prof. Muruvvet Buyukboyaci, Economics Department, METU
Feb 7, Friday, 1:40 p.m.
EA-409
Abstract: One explanation for the prevalence of self‐managed work teams is that they enable workers with complementary skills to specialize in the tasks they do best, a benefit that may be enhanced if workers can sort themselves into teams. To assess this explanation, we design a real‐effort experiment to study the endogenous formation of teams, and its effect on productivity, when specialization either is or is not feasible. We find a strong positive interaction between endogenous team formation and the ability to specialize, indicating that endogenous team formation is a particularly effective mechanism for promoting team output in production environments that enable the exploitation of skill complementarities.
Bio: Muruvvet Buyukboyaci obtained her B.S. degree in Mathematics from Bilkent University, and M.A. in Economics from Sabanci University. She obtained her Ph.D. in Social Sciences from California Institute of Technology in 2013 where she designed and conducted experiments on coordination games and contests. After her PhD, she started working as an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at METU where she served as one of the founding members of the Economics Research Laboratory. Her research interests include Applied Microeconomics, Experimental Economics, and Behavioral Economics. She is the recipient of METU Young Researcher award, TUBITAK 2232 Fellowship and Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship.