Turnover Effects on Exploration and Exploitation: An NK Landscape Experiment Experiment design presentation
In today's business and technology landscape, organizations and their members often encounter complex problems involving numerous interdependent decisions (Simon, 1962). To tackle these challenges, individuals and teams must engage in a search process that alternates between exploration and exploitation. When solving problems in teams, individuals tend to quickly transition from exploration to exploitation (Giannoccaro et al., 2020). Furthermore, fully connected groups encounter difficulty in generating more complex solutions (Derex and Boyd, 2016).
I aim to investigate whether changes in team composition can offset these tendencies and facilitate the creation of more diverse solutions. In a lab experiment, participants will engage in solving a complex NK landscape task. Some teams will undergo turnover with team members, while others will remain unchanged. In the turnover condition, some teams experience the departure of the member with the highest (lowest) performance in the previous rounds. Through this setup, I would like to analyze the effects of turnover and turnover conditions on search behaviors.
The experiment will be run at the end of the month, and feedback on the design would be appreciated.