Optimizing competence in the service of collaboration

In order to efficiently divide labor with others, it’s important to understand what our collaborators can do (i.e., their competence). However, competence is not static—people get better at particular jobs the more often they perform them. This plasticity of competence creates a challenge for collaboration: For example, is it better to assign tasks to whoever is most competent now, or to the person who can be trained most efficiently “on-the-job”? We conducted two experiments (N = 199) that examine how people make decisions about whom to train (Experiment 1) and whom to recruit (Experiment 2) to a collaborative task, based on the collaborators’ starting expertise, the training opportunities available, and the goal of the task. We found that participants’ decisions were best captured by a planning model that attempts to maximize the returns from collaboration while minimizing the costs of hiring and training individual collaborators. This planning model outperformed alternative myopic models that based these decisions on the agents’ current strengths, or on how much agents stood to improve in a single training step, without considering whether this training would enable agents to succeed at the task in the long run. Our findings suggest that people do not recruit and train collaborators based solely on their current competence, nor solely on the opportunities for their collaborators to improve. Instead, people use an intuitive theory of competence to balance the costs of hiring and training others against the benefits to the collaboration.