Endogenous role assignment and team performance

We study how the mechanism used for assigning roles within teams affects team performance. Subjects play the takeover game in buyer-seller teams. Understanding optimal play is demanding for buyers and trivial for sellers, so teams should perform better if the buyer is the abler teammate. When teammates are allowed to jointly choose their roles, abler teammates tend to become buyers, but this is more than offset by disruptions to the learning process. We examine two potential sources for the latter effect, and find that endogenous role assignment has a negative psychological and emotional effect on buyers.