Decision making is a team effort

People take decision in team's interest

In their study, a group from Leicester University and Exeter University carried out the first systematic tests of team reasoning theories by assessing two well-known views of how people behave.

Orthodox or classical game predicts that people will act for selfish reasons. Team reasoning theory suggests that individual self-interest is not always foremost in the way people act as they look after the interest of their team.

According to lead researcher Prof Andrew Colman, "We have shown, in some circumstances, decision makers cooperate in their collective interests rather than following the purely selfish predictions of orthodox game theory.

"We carried out two experiments designed to test classical game theory against theories of team reasoning developed in the 1990s by British game theorists.

"According to classical game theory, decision makers invariably act in their individual self-interest, leading to "Nash equilibrium", named after the US game theorist John Nash, depicted in the biopic A Beautiful Mind.

"Theories of team reasoning were developed to explain why, in some circumstances, people seem to act not in their individual self-interest but in the interest of their families, companies, departments, or the religious, ethnic, or national groups with which they identify themselves."  

Professor Colman is delighted with the results. "Team reasoning is a familiar process, but it is inexplicable within the framework of orthodox game theory. Our findings show that it predicts decision making more powerfully than orthodox game theory in some games," the British media quoted him as saying.