Cognitive challenges in human-AI collaboration: Investigating the path towards productive delegation

We study how humans make decisions when they collaborate with an artificial intelligence (AI): each instance of a classification task could be classified by themselves or by the AI. Experimental results suggest that humans and AI who work together can outperform the superior AI when it works alone. However, this only occurred when the AI delegated work to humans, not when humans delegated work to the AI. The AI profited, even from working with low-performing subjects, but humans did not delegate well. This bad delegation performance cannot be explained with algorithm aversion. On the contrary, subjects tried to follow a provided delegation strategy diligently and appeared to appreciate the AI support. However, human results suffered due to a lack of metaknowledge. They were not able to assess their own capabilities correctly, which in turn leads to poor delegation decisions. In contrast to reluctance to use AI, lacking metaknowledge is an unconscious tr

The risk of algorithm transparency: How algorithm complexity drives the effects on the use of advice

Although algorithmic decision support is omnipresent in many managerial tasks, a lack of algorithm transparency is often stated as a barrier to successful human-machine collaboration. In this paper, we analyze the effects of algorithm transparency on the use of advice from algorithms with different degrees of complexity. We conduct a set of laboratory experiments in which participants receive identical advice from algorithms with different levels of transparency and complexity. Our results indicate that not the algorithm itself, but the individually perceived appropriateness of algorithmic complexity moderates the effects of transparency on the use of advice. We summarize this effect as a plateau curve: While perceiving an algorithm as too simple severely harms the use of its advice, the perception of an algorithm as being too complex has no significant effect. Our insights suggest that managers do not have to be concerned about revealing algorithms that are perceived to be appropriately complex or too complex to decision-makers, even if the decision-makers do not fully comprehend them. However, providing transparency on algorithms that are perceived to be simpler than appropriate could disappoint people's expectations and thereby reduce the use of their advice

The use of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in healthcare with a focus on hospitals

The healthcare sector in general and hospitals in particular represent a main application area for Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). This paper reviews 262 papers of DEA applications in healthcare with special focus on hospitals and therefore closes a gap of over ten years that were not covered by existing review articles. Apart from providing descriptive statistics of the papers, we are the first to examine the research purposes of the publications. These research goals can be grouped into four distinct clusters according to our proposed framework. The four clusters are (1) Pure DEA efficiency analysis, i.e. performing a DEA on hospital data, (2) Developments or applications of new methodologies, i.e. applying new DEAy approaches on hospital data, (3) Specific management question, i.e. analyzing the effects of managerial specification, such as ownership, on hospital efficiency, and (4) Surveys on the effects of reforms, i.e. researching the impact of policy making, such as reforms of health systems, on hospital efficiency. Furthermore, we analyze the methodological settings of the studies and describe the applied models. We analyze the chosen inputs and outputs as well as all relevant downstream techniques. A further contribution of this paper is its function as a roadmap to important methodological literature and publications, which provide crucial information on the setup of DEA studies. Thus, this paper should be of assistance to researchers planning to apply DEA in a hospital setting by providing information on a) what has been published between 2005 and 2016, b) possible pitfalls when setting up a DEA analysis, and c) possible ways to apply the DEA analysis in practice. Finally, we discuss what could be done to advance DEA from a scientific tool to an instrument that is actually utilized by managers and policymakers