Research Seminar
Thursday, February 2nd, 2023 12:30-13:30
Room 130 Lascrosses Building
With
Pr Lemuria CARTER,
University of New South Wales (UNSW)
Sydney
Registration required
Title:
How was My Performance? Exploring the Role of Anchoring Bias in AI-assisted Decision Making
Organizations leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze data and support decision making. However, the integration of AI into organizational workflows may introduce unintended biases. Despite the proliferation of AI in organizations, no study to date has juxtaposed the impact of human and AI recommendations on decision making. Using two controlled experiments of 775 mangers, we explore the impact of AI and cognitive bias on performance appraisal ratings. In particular, we examine anchoring and adjustment bias and present an effective strategy for mitigating this bias. The findings show managers’ performance ratings are impacted by the presence of an AI recommendation. The source of the recommendation (human or AI) interacted with the anchor (high or low) to influence a manager’s rating. In particular, a high anchor produced different performance ratings for each source. However, when exposed to a low anchor, supervisors did not produce varied estimates from AI and non-AI recommendations. These findings suggest managers should be aware of the differential effects of anchoring and adjustment bias on organizational decisions. An employee’s performance may be rated differently, not because of her behavior, but because of the source of the recommendation and magnitude of the anchor. This paper makes several significant contributions: (1) it is among the first studies to empirically test the presence and salience of anchoring bias in AI-assisted decision making; (2) it presents the consider-the-opposite strategy as an approach to effectively debias the anchoring effects of AI recommendations.
Pr Lemuria CARTER, Bio
Lemuria Carter is a Professor in the School of Information Systems and Technology Management (ISTM) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. Her research interests include technology adoption, digital government and information privacy. Her research has been funded by the Institute for Homeland Security Solutions and the Southeastern Transportation Institute in the United States. Her research has been published in numerous top-tier journals including the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, and Decision Support Systems. Dr. Carter’s initial study on e-government adoption published in Information Systems Journal (ISJ) in 2005 is one of the most cited papers in the discipline, with more than 3,000 Google Scholar citations. She has served as the digital government track and mini-track chair for the Americas Conference on Information Systems and the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. In 2019, she was recognized for co-authoring the most highly cited paper in the Basket of 8 Information Systems Journal (ISJ). She has also been recognized as one of the top 30 most prolific contributors to e-government research.