Endogenous role assignment and team performance*

Abstract: Team success relies on assigning team members to the right tasks. We use controlled experiments to study how the mechanism used for assigning roles within teams affects team performance. Subjects play the takeover game in teams consisting of a buyer and a seller. Understanding optimal play is very demanding for buyers and trivial for sellers, so teams should perform better if the more able teammate takes the buyer role. When teammates are allowed to jointly choose their roles, the more able teammate tends to become the buyer, but this is more than offset by disruptions to the learning process