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Beyond being in the lab: using multi-agent modeling to isolate competing hypotheses

Published: 02 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

In studies of virtual teams, it is difficult to determine pure effects of geographic isolation and uneven communication technology. We developed a multi-agent computer model in NetLogo to complement laboratory-based organizational simulations [3]. In the lab, favoritism among collocated team members (collocators) appeared to increase their performance. However, in the computer simulation, when controlled for communication delay, in-group favoritism had a detrimental effect on the performance of collocators. This suggested that the advantage of collocators shown in the lab was due to synchronous communication, not favoritism. The canceling-out effects of in-group bias and communication delay explained why many studies did not see performance difference between collocated and remote team members. The multi-agent modeling in this case proved its value by both clarifying previous laboratory findings and guiding design of future experiments.

References

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Bos, N., Sadat Shami, N., Olson, J.S., Cheshin, A. and Nan, N. In-group/out-group effects in distributed teams: An experimental simulation. In Proc. CSCW 2004, ACM Press (2004), 429--436.
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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI EA '05: CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2005
      1358 pages
      ISBN:1595930027
      DOI:10.1145/1056808
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 02 April 2005

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      1. computer supported cooperative work
      2. computer-mediated communication
      3. in-group favoritism
      4. multi-agent modeling
      5. virtual team

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