Identifying Experts and Effective Teams of Experts

SPRING 2012 RESEARCH INCUBATION AWARDEES 

Evimaria Terzi (Computer Science, College of Arts and Sciences) and Nachiketa Sahoo (Information Systems, Questrom School of Business)

In many settings, individuals form teams and work together in order to complete a project. For example, within companies groups of employees perform tasks collectively in groups. Similarly, scientists merged their skills and formed groups that write papers, grants or patents. Given the observed outcomes of such coalitions (i.e, papers written by groups of authors), our project had the following goals: (a) quantify the expertise of agents (individuals), and (b) identify teams of experts that can perform a task successfully or alternatively predict the performance of a team.

The key characteristic of our research, which separates it from existing work in the literature, is that we focused on the effect of team dynamics in the observed or the predicted outcome. In particular, while estimating expertise focused on disentangling the effect of each team member in the observed outcome. Similarly, our methodology for forming effective teams (or predicting the performance of formed teams) was based on the thesis that potential and the capabilities of a team is larger than the sum of the potential or the capabilities of the team’s members; a team that is functioning properly can achieve much more than the sum of the potential achievements of its individual members, while a dysfunctional team can simply kill the potential of success.

This work was funded by a Hariri Research Award made in June, 2012.