🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the inference bias that arises when organizations evaluate expert competence solely based on project success or failure, a distortion attributable to differences in task bundling architectures. Drawing on Bayesian inference and Blackwell’s partial order theory, this work compares the informational value of bundled, outsourced, and unbundled projects, derives reliability thresholds, and quantifies the statistical costs associated with coarse-grained aggregation. The primary contribution lies in establishing, for the first time, a precise threshold relationship between task architecture and learning efficiency, revealing that under fixed workloads, the advantage of bundling strengthens as task scope expands. Furthermore, it demonstrates that bundling dominates when external technologies are unreliable, and that interim auditing can significantly broaden its region of superiority.
📝 Abstract
Organizations often learn about competence only from project-level success or failure, even when a project contains several complementary tasks. We compare task architectures by the Blackwell order. An expert of unknown fixed competence can perform all tasks in one bundled project, one task in a project completed by an outside technology, or the same number of tasks across separate projects. Bundling dominates a single narrow assignment below an outside-reliability threshold and is otherwise incomparable with it. Holding the expert's workload fixed strictly lowers this threshold but does not overturn the result: bundling still dominates when the outside technology is sufficiently unreliable, separate projects dominate only when that technology is perfect, and the experiments are otherwise incomparable. We derive the thresholds for any number of tasks and show that the fixed-workload threshold decreases to zero as task scope grows. Explicit posterior-variance formulas measure the cost of coarse aggregation for particular decisions. Finally, in the two-task case, occasional stage-level audits expand the bundling-dominance region according to an exact frontier.