THE DYNAMICS OF LEARNING WITH TEAM PRODUCTION - IMPLICATIONS FOR TASKASSIGNMENT

We analyze optimal task assignment when a firm needs to learn the abil ities of employees. When projects require collaboration between junior s and seniors and only team outputs are observable, having juniors div ide their time between two projects (''junior sharing'') is less infor mative about their abilities, but more informative about their senior teammates' abilities, than having juniors devote all their time to a s ingle project (''no sharing''). In an overlapping-generations model, w e show that no sharing is more (less) attractive than junior sharing i f the prior uncertainty about abilities is small (large) relative to e xogenous shocks to team production.